Hector Berlioz, in an 1822 entry in his Memoirs, shedding considerable light on his decision to pursue music rather than medicine: Robert…took me for the first time to the dissecting room…. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house—fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae—such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting room and fled for home as though Death
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