by a MMM Pre-Med Student 1948                                 Ireland                               18.10.2025

Tick! Tick! Tick! Inexorably the clock ticked on, every moment bringing me nearer to nine o’clock, and to my anatomy lesson and my first dogfish. Vainly I tried to persuade myself that dogfish were only a particularly objectionable kind of fish, but my heart was two to the beat as I mounted the stairs to the Zoology Theatre. My imagination would persist in in unfolding lurid pictures in which the scalpel was not in my hands but in the fins of the dogfish.

As I walked to my desk, mu knees were shaky, but I sat down and waited for the next move. This came more quickly than I expected. Glancing down at my desk, I saw that Scillium Canicula was already enthroned on the dissecting board. I nearly hopped off the high stool when I saw it. He lay in an attitude of passive submission. Though his caudal fin was missing, I was not reassured. I edged my stool nearer, inch by inch, until I had placed the width of a desk between myself and the object of my disgust. Assuming the air of nonchalance, I tried to appear unaware of the presence of the dogfish, but I had one eye on it and the other on the door. I believed discretion to be the better part of valour, and at the least evidence of life, I was ready to take to my heels.

As the attendant was passing my desk, she said, “Turn your dogfish over to the ventral position.” Summoning up my courage, I touched the fish. It was clammy and cold, so I pulled my finger away again. “Come on, it doesn’t bite, you know,” said the attendant jokingly. Gritting my teeth, I pulled at the specimen, but it only hovered for a moment and flapped down into its former position. The attendant was standing by with a look of tolerant amusement on her face and the other students were casting curious glances in my direction, so, with a do-or-die expression, I jerked at the innocent cause of my disturbance.

But I jerked too hard, and the dogfish flashed through the air and landed with a splash on the neck of the student across the way. The student yelped and jumped aside, knocking down his neighbour who grabbed at a dissecting board to save himself. The two students and Scillium Canicula were wrapped in close interest, and by the time the attendant had disentangled them Scillium Canicula’s career as “Uni. specimen” was over.

Amidst suppressed laughter from the other students, I recovered the remains of the dogfish and my dignity, and the lesson was continued. The attendant, more in sorrow than in anger, suggested that I should use a forceps when handling a dogfish in future. I then remembered with a start that I had not remembered to bring my instruments with me.

However, by that evening, I had forgotten my unpleasant experience and cycling home form College, I was ravenously hungry. I was looking forward to supper. I sat down at table wit a slight aroma of dogfish still about me, but I resolutely ignored it. But soon a horrible suspicion dawned, and I knew the worst had happened when a third Year Medical Student callously exclaimed, “Fishcakes for supper! Great, isn’t it?” –