The Vertebra's Second Life

This creative work collates a brief reflective essay, visual artwork, and a poem inspired by a sea creature’s vertebra found on a Florida beach. Years after first encountering the bone as an unfamiliar object, the author returned to it after beginning medical school and anatomy lab, recognizing it through a newly transformed way of seeing. The piece explores how medical learning extends beyond the human body into relationships with nonhuman life, material objects, family memory, art, loss, and the natural world. Through the transformation of the vertebra into an artwork, the piece reflects on medicine as a practice of relational perception: finding meaning, beauty, and hope in what first appears to be only the remnants of loss.