Michal Coret is a medical student at the University of Toronto. She writes poetry, short fiction, and plays about medical encounters and experiences in medical school. Her poem “No Expiration” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of Intima. — Michal Coret is a medical student at the University of Toronto. She writes poetry, short fiction, and plays about medical encounters and experiences in medical school. Her poem “No Expiration” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of *Intima*.

Some places are indeed so sacred that they may not be traversed. We may call them ‘sacrosanct,’ for they are too valuable to be interfered with. Inviolable: not to be broken, infringed, or dishonoured. But some of us go down a life path which, perhaps rebelliously, perhaps unknowingly, makes us trespass into these sacred temples. The anatomy lab of medical school enforces two compelling and seemingly opposing directives: the body is sacred, do not degrade it; the body needs healing, you must learn it. And so we enter this shaky experiment, at once both humbled and fearful, for we must answer to both directives with impeccable loyalty.

This tension and gratitude are felt in Nancy Yang’s visual art piece “In This Chamber Most Sacred” (Fall 2016, Intima). Her fascinating painting draws you into a cadaver’s chest, depicted glowingly with a religious quality. The ribs look like pillars of a sanctuary, guiding you towards something deeper and unknown. The sanctity is both appealing and frightening. This piece compliments my own poem “No Expiration” (Spring 2020, Intima) where I am faced with opening a cadaver’s chest and removing her lungs. In both pieces, we are reflecting on what it is like to open a human chest, and what feelings such an experience might evoke. The breathlessness described in my poem is in part due to this feeling of trespassing into a place I am not supposed to be in. A cadaver’s body represents a past often unknown to the medical students who dissect it. We wonder about who she was, how she lived, and who she loved. We value her remains out of respect for her and the necessity of medical training. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that I have done something unholy in this chamber most sacred.

Michal Coret is a medical student at the University of Toronto. She writes poetry, short fiction, and plays about medical encounters and experiences in medical school. Her creative work and research has appeared in Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine and The Muse Magazine. She is passionate about qualitative research in medical humanities, empathy, and education. She is currently the co -director of ArtBeat at the University of Toronto, which strives to bring the humanities to medical students in a meaningful and engaging way .