This feature story follows a group of six first-year students at the Medical College of Wisconsin through the most pivotal course in their quest to become doctors: Gross anatomy. The story takes readers into a world that few will ever know, one where youthful caffeine-chugging doctors-to-be are forced to rethink their goals and ambitions, their views of medicine and the role of doctors, of life and death and what follows. “The Course of Their Lives” ties together the mystery facing the medical students of Table 1 as they struggle to determine what killed the woman whose body they are working on, and story of 80-year-old Geraldine “Nana” Fotsch and how she came to the decision to one day donate her body to be examined by a similar group of students.
