Mrs. Jones was my first patient when I started medical school—and I owe her a lot.

    She was under my care for the first two years of my medical training, yet I knew very little about her, except that she was thin, perhaps in her mid 70s. It might seem rather negligent not to know the basic facts of my patient ,but I had a valid reason—Mrs. Jones was dead, and had been dead for about three years before I made a patient of her. Mrs. Jones was the dead body that I dissected（解剖）over the first two years of my medical training.

Of course, her name wasn't really Mrs. Jones, but it seemed a little impolite to be conducting research into someone's body without even knowing its name, so out of courtesy, I thought she should have one. "Me and Mrs. Jones, we've got a thing going on," went the song coming out of the radio as I unzipped the bag of her on my first day — and so she was christened.

As the months passed, I soon forgot that Mrs. Jones had, in fact, once been alive. One day, though, she suddenly became very human again. I'd been dissecting Mrs. Jones a good 18 months before I got around to the uterus（子宫）. After I'd removed it, the professor came up to me, "If you look at the opening carefully, you'll see that the angle indicates that this woman has had several children, probably three." I stared at it, and I suddenly felt very strange. This woman, who had given me something incredibly precious that I'd begun to take for granted, wasn't a dead body. She was a person, a mother, in fact.

    At my graduation, the same professor came over to congratulate me. I explained the story about Mrs. Jones to him, and recalled what he'd told me about her having children and how that had affected me all those years ago.

"Well," he said, "at the beginning of your training you had a dead body and managed to turn it into a person. Now you're a doctor, the trick is to have a person and not turn them into a dead body," and he laughed, shook my hand and walked away.