Little slices of peach-coloured meat dissolving in ether. Some no more than an inch across.

The humming light of the classroom brings memories of death and then some. It’s in a slice of cirrhosed liver for instance, mutton-red, run through with dead black tissue. Via the scannable code for the case history: male, sixty-five, stumbles into emergency ward in dead of night alone. A pain in the gut like a knot. Weeks pass---he dies.

There are nearly fifteen hundred specimens in the University of New South Wales’ Museum of Human Disease. Advisories against photos are in place. We owe at least this much to the parts of the dead. They are sightless, hanging things. Noisy, our feet, squelching on the linoleum.

The history of pain is laid out by organ, starting from the right of the room. Diseases of the liver come first, then stomach, the intestines, the spleen. Lungs sit pretty in dragonfruit-pink. Some brains are the size of two cupped palms, though the case history assures that this came from a woman in her forties. The children run from glass case to glass case, squinting at the insides. Whispers one, look, c’mere, there’s a whole foot in here. On the other side of the room, the samples are arranged by malady: amputations, infarctions, ulcers, tumours, hernias, stones, cysts, and clots.

A man is laid out in a perspex cabinet. Slices of him are on each shelf. The black spots on the skin scream melanoma. On every organ are its dark shadows. Fingerprints where the cancer’s touched. Hand, heart, nerves, and bone. The cabinet is nearly as tall as the man was in life. Anthony Gormley would have smiled.

At the back of the room, behind a trigger warning on a standee, are the trauma victims. Suicide, mostly. Leaving cleanly takes planning and courage. Unfortunately, most do not leave so cleanly. I try to say a little prayer to each. The forty-something alcoholic, the teenage boy, the gunshot wound, the woman and her gut bloodied by rat poison. There are six of them in all. The shelf is located in a shallow corridor that leads to a barred-off door, tucked away from the rest of the museum so that it forms a dim alcove, like a chapel of a cathedral.

Did you know? When a bullet leaves a skull it leaves behind a little star.

The body is the body at the end of the day. I have to remind myself to drink some water halfway through. Because of the grief, and also because we are warned of the dangers of kidney stones, the small white spears like babies’ teeth. If anything this will be a reminder to take care of ourselves. I smile nervously at the receptionist as I leave and nearly miss the signage to the bathroom. I have spent nearly three hours here. Outside, it has just started raining like nothing has happened, and the water is catching the leaves, the light, everything.