There were many unforgettable aspects to My Dead Body (Channel 4), the televised dissection of a young woman named Toni Crews. One of them was the moment when the top of Crews’s skull was wrenched off to reveal the brain within. It made a sound that I am simply unable to describe, but which caused the audience of medical students to gasp in shock.
It sounds gruesome. And yet Crews’s body was treated with great respect, which may seem an odd thing to say about someone being cut up in front of us. This was no exercise in voyeurism. Crews was the first person in Britain to donate her body to science for public display, waiving her right to anonymity. A mother of two young children, she died aged just 30, after a rare cancer of the lacrimal gland spread throughout her body. Her parents supported her wishes, although anyone in their position would have misgivings. How brave it was of them to appear on camera here.
The programme was not for the fainthearted. Most of us have never seen a dead body, certainly not like this. Crews looked unrecognisable from the photographs we saw of her, and really looked very unlike a living person, her body waxy and swollen. With no fanfare, the professor of anatomy, Claire Smith, began cutting into her skull. The filming was done with restraint – it was less graphic than footage of hospital operations, for example, which are commonplace on television – and we were able to follow different procedures, such as the slicing of Crews’s brain and the removal of her eye socket.
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