Narrative Medicine
The Vertebra’s Second Life
Elizabeth Kaye, BA¹
¹ University of Central Florida College of Medicine, Orlando, Florida
Abstract:
This creative work collates a brief reflective essay, visual artwork, and a poem inspired by a sea creature’s vertebra found on a Florida beach. Years after first encountering the bone as an unfamiliar object, the author returned to it after beginning medical school and anatomy lab, recognizing it through a transformed way of seeing. The piece explores how medical learning extends beyond the human body into relationships with nonhuman life, material objects, family memory, art, loss, and the natural world. Through the transformation of the vertebra into an artwork, the piece reflects on medicine as a practice of relational perception: finding meaning, beauty, and hope in what first appears to be only the remnants of loss.
Years ago, my uncle found a bone washed ashore on a Florida beach. After bringing it home to Boston, I asked my dad to drill a hole through its center because I imagined turning it into art. My dad drilled the hole, but I never completed the artwork. Instead, the bone sat untouched in my parents’ house for years. What I remember most vividly is the sound of the drill cutting into bone, a sound that felt deeply unsettling.
Four years later, I began medical school.
During anatomy lab, that sound became familiar. It never became ordinary, but it became meaningful. When I came home on break after beginning dissection of our cadaver, I looked at the bone again and immediately recognized what I had not been able to see before: it was the vertebra of a sea creature.
Medical school did not change the bone. It changed the mind behind the eyes that looked upon it. I decided to return to the vertebra and continue shaping it into art.
For centuries, physicians have learned anatomy not only from the human body, but also through the study of other animals. Even today, medicine continues to draw inspiration from the natural world. Reading Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers deepened my appreciation that other creatures have much to teach us, not only about stress and disease but also about resilience, adaptation, and healing itself. What had once been only a remnant of a life beneath the sea became a reminder that learning transforms not only what we know, but what we are able to see. This poem grew from that shift:
The Spirit of Healing
Spirit and inspiration rise from the ruins
that slowly but surely
breathe life into form.
My experience with the vertebra also reminded me that medicine is shaped through relation: between human and nonhuman bodies, memory and materiality, loss and art, learning and the natural world. In the accompanying image, beads suspend from the vertebra as if it is still moving through water, honoring both the creature it once supported and the curiosity it continues to inspire. For me, it has become a symbol of medicine itself: finding beauty, meaning, and hope in what first appears to be only the remnants of loss.
