Horses and Number Eight
April 29th 2008 21:00
Photo by Didier.tresse. Used in accordance with the terms of Wikimedia Commons’ GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
When I was about eight or nine I went through a horse phase. I was crazy about horses, especially just having seen National Velvet on TV. My dream was to become a jockey.
My parents had bought my sister and me a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I had picked up volume eight (or number eight as my sister called it) and was trying to look up the horses section. I found an anatomical sketch of horse. Ugh. It showed what a skinned horse looked liked so you could see all its muscles. Gory. I then flipped past it and stumbled on the human anatomy section. This was far gorier than the horse illustration. There were anatomical drawings of humans and skulls. Terrified, I slammed the volume shut.
My sister soon found out about my aversion to number eight. She discovered that the best way to bribe into doing (or not doing) something was to threaten to open up number eight to the human anatomical sketches. Even though she was younger than me, for some reason the anatomical drawings didn’t bother her.
Years later, when I was an adult I opened up number eight out of curiosity. I still didn’t like the horse or human anatomical drawings. There was something so sinister about them. Even though they were black and white, they were very realistic drawings. My dream back then was to become a doctor. Ditto my sister. For some reason, we both wanted to do autopsies. My sister would continually mock me about wanting to be a doctor when I couldn’t even cope with looking at X-rays or number eight. She had a point there but my doctor says it’s natural to have an aversion to looking or thinking about dead bodies and as a medical student, he was slowly introduced to anatomy so he had time to get used to dealing with dead human bodies.
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