It was a great pleasure to attend Gil Hedley’s Nerve Tour in Portland, Maine, last night. With his characteristic flair, Gil unfolds a complete anatomy of our neural net, woven with a unique and touching story of ‘Captain’ – the model for much of the project – and the involvement of his family and other ‘friends of Gil’ in this labor of love. Really sweetly done, and totally unusual, as most times you have no notion about the personal lives of those who donate.
As a sometime dissector, I know how much labor and thought was involved in recreating that old osteopathic venture of laying the whole system on a lacquered board.
Gil is patient and entertaining in his presentation, but clearly determined to get you to see the whole picture, and relate the ‘onion tree’ of the neural net to life. The moment at the end where he holds the whole nervous system by the brain and sacral plexus – almost like Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican – moves one to tears.
Gil and I go back more than 30 years. I was his first anatomy teacher, to my credit, but he has so far surpassed my anatomical knowledge that I was both informed and inspired by his care, compassion, and fierce dedication to stick to what he can see.
You can spend a lot worse afternoons than moving your rear end off the phone to go see this presentation live.
Probably coming to a venue near you – he’s in the middle of a 111-city tour.
Learn more about Gil Hedley’s Nerve Tour here.
