the destruction begins

The assignment in anatomy lab today: rip off someone's head. I would really like to say that statement is an exaggeration, but seriously, we took a chisel and hammered it in between the cadaver's skull and vertebrae in attempt to "disarticulate" it. Ideally, I would like to paint the picture that this was done gracefully and elegantly, but I believe that to be impossible when we were using a hacksaw and hammers for the majority of lab. This was culminated by the rather brutal separation of head and neck at the end of lab. However, to paint this in an academic light, after three hours of manual labor, we did save all of three structures: the transverse ligament of the atlas, the greater occipital nerves and the vertebral arteries.