One afternoon when I was slaving in the anatomy dissection hall, teaching preclinical students the nuances of human anatomy, a sparrow darting across the hall got knocked down by a ceiling fan. The avian crash evoked shrill shrieks from damsels, and soon a few wet hankies were doing the rounds. I scurried over to investigate the “fall of the sparrow,” welcoming the brief respite from my onerous chores. The little bird was senseless with eyes shut, a little heart weakly thumping, and oozing blood. Ministering to the avian patient, I became aware that among the crowd of sighing students was one face that seemed a wee bit more senile—oops, my professor.
Arms akimbo, he peered down through his bifocals and gravely commented, “To treat the injured, one needs to be thoroughly versed in the basic medical subjects, such as, say, anatomy.” He paused before continuing, “If I was a postgraduate student in anatomy, like you are now, and this happened, I would love to dissect the bird... learn some basic stuff—such as that the sparrow, Passer domesticus, displays corpora bigemina, not corpora quadrigemina. Anyway,” he muttered audibly, “imbeciles wouldn't know birds had bigemina, when they don't know that humans had quadri...”
The throng quickly melted. Thus it came about that I ended up dissecting the sparrow, to display the odd configuration of its midbrain dorsum—and, because of the sparrow's fall, I was assigned a dissertation on bird embryology as part of my masters degree.
I was condemned to handle 300 eggs of the white leghorn, drilling and injecting them, day in and day out. I smelt of eggs, like stale egg shampoo—and for someone who had never touched an egg in his life, thanks to an orthodox vegetarian upbringing, the egginess of the exercise was galling (from the Latin gallus, in this case).
However, I later became recognised as something of an expert in ornithology, even receiving a gold medal for my project, and became proficient enough to dash off articles to ornithological websites and magazines. It's as if Shakespeare wrote “there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” in Hamlet just for me.
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