What's the Point of Taking Apart a Body?

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I'm glad Mr Geller seems to be bouncing between "videogames are cool" and "oh my God we are souls trapped within meat machines"

I've come to call Jacob's vibe as "the blessing and burden of consciousness"

As someone who has wanted to be a forensic pathologist since I was a kid, the suspicion aspect really hits home. The looks I get when someone asks me what I want to go to medical school for have eventually lead me to start lying and saying "oh, I'm open to any specialty really." My own fiance will sometimes flinch away at my hands when she's reminded I've dissected a cadaver for class before. She says she can't imagine how such a nice person could do such a thing, as if I were a murderer or something.

This has to be my favorite YouTube channel

Here's a a joke I heard from my father: "After finishing the autopsy we can confirm that cause of death was the autopsy"

The ending reminds me of what a priest character in Vinland Saga says about a dead body. "He is dead, and therefore more beautiful than anyone alive. You might say he is love itself. For you see... he will not hate, nor kill, nor steal. Don't you find that wonderful? His body will be abandoned here... and his flesh will feed the beasts and insects. He will be blown about by the wind... and pelted by the rain... and he will not raise a single word in complaint. It is death that completes a man."

as someone with a rare genetic disease, im planning on donating my body to science. this video is amazing. i want to spend my life advocating for others like me, and i want to further research long after i am dead. we have so much to learn from our dead, and it’s a shame the topic is so taboo in western culture.

Whoever Kim is, I hope they found peace. My Condolences, Jacob.

From someone in the pathology community I can expand on the crisis you mentioned. Its not simply about the money, its about 2 very large filters. First, the way medical school admissions is structured already biases selecting against those who are interested in pathology as a specialty. Constructing a narrative about your motivations to pursue medicine often requires speaking about the emotional impact of interactions with patients. People wanting to go into fields that are not patient facing therefore either have to essentially lie/embellish/hide their interests or are screened out during the application process. Then, once someone has entered residency to become a pathologist, they have a plethora of subspecialty fellowship options to choose from. Autopsy is one of only many options for residents to pursue and THEN you add on top of that that its salary is generally lower and working conditions are less desirable (actually dissecting a corpse compared to say just looking at slides in your office) and you end up with very few people who want to become forensic pathologists.

Jacob just HAD to slip in the phrase "boss baby" Stellar video as always. My genuine favourite content creator on Youtube.

Several months after a dear friend of mine died, I was finally informed of how. A heart attack at the age of 36. They'd had a heart condition all of their life and I figured that it was what had taken them from the world so soon. But they were also depressed. And while we hadn't truly worried about it, consciously, there was still a relief in knowing that they hadn't left us intentionally. Life just... happened. And then it ended. And we learned what happened and even though I was pulled back headfirst into grieving, I am glad for it.

I think a lot about Speaker for the Dead in general, but specifically, a line near the end as Ender explains the true tragedy of their actions to the piggies. “Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.”

This makes me reflect on how many funerary traditions around the world incorporate some form of "cannibalism", whether that outright eating their flesh or imbibing their ashes, or even spreading their ashes onto the bodies of others. From a certain perspective, you can see how it's an intimate act; a desperate attempt to internalize and make someone else, someone lost and mourned, a part of yourself again.

This hit me hard. I buried my cat last week after he died in my arms over a very traumatic hour. We were incredibly close and seeing him go from full of life to a cold stiff cadaver really made me recontextualise life, the soul, and how it's all wrapped up in such a well adapted yet so specifically vulnerable organic form. Your videos on mortality have been unexpectedly helpful in this process. Your writing is truly moving. Many thanks and here's hoping for happier topics around the corner.

I’m a medical student, have been one for the last six years, and this episode strikes a particular nerve with me. During my years of study and experience at the hospital, the one thing that i couldn’t handle at an emotional level involved a corpse, and this always stuck with me. I mean, I got used to seeing wounds and illnesses and their effects on people, from limb amputations to extensive burns to suppurating lesions, and of course there is empathy for the patients and their conditions, but all my interactions with them never felt “wrong” or “out of place” in any particular way. The one time this particular feeling arose, it was during the study and subsequent experience of a type of autopsy ; it was with a corpse, and the fact that the not living, bodies that used to be persons and are now things, made me “feel” more than living breathing persons ended up exposing a number of questions about myself and what I can or can’t do. The particular procedure was the study of the corpse of a newborn to determine if it had ever lived or if it was a stillbirth, to distinguish between infanticide and concealement of the corpse. In Italian it is called “study of docimacies” , but from my understanding the word “docimasia” has a more restrictive meaning in English.

The phrase "Before you is a temple of pain that knew little tenderness in life" is something that has haunted my mind from the very first moment I read it. So much suffering condensed into a mere 13 words.

The true horror comes from seeing Jacob grow such a thick beard so quickly between videos

"For Kim" carried such a shocking level of emotional weight that I welled up unexpectedly.

the bit about the body giving one last word or message hit me very hard. My father died of a sudden heart attack, it was only through autopsy we figured out why and revealed a physiological, most likely genetic, predisposition in the men of my family that I suddenly was aware that I was carrying as well. He was himself a doctor. This video hit me hard, grief is funny, but in a good way.