A small crowd of iBioMeds, engineers, and Health Sciences students were recently captured on film taking a scalpel to a pig’s abdomen in a carefully practiced, ritualistic manner.
In an unprecedented and mutually profitable partnership between McMaster students and the Hamilton meat industry, students have independently rediscovered the ancient tradition of haruspicy: divination from dissected animal innards.
“We’ve endured plenty of BS advice from TA’s, from faculty, everyone really. It seems like no one knows what’s going on. So we decided to consult something equally helpful,” responded one frustrated second-year iBioMed, elbow-deep in her fourth porcine abdominopelvic cavity of the week. “This pig’s spleen is probably going to be on the next bellringer anyway.”
Spreading the intestines onto a tray, one engineer offered to walk our Procrastinator correspondents through an after-hours divination session to assess the veracity of dubious supportive platitudes from upper years. “Ok, so I just missed the ileum, and grabbed the colon. That means that they’re full of shit.”
Anonymous sources close to the Education Program in Anatomy believe that if the haruspicy continues to provide accurate advice, the anatomy faculty will consider fully replacing the Teaching Assistants with piles of pig innards. Researchers at the Anatomy department have already undertaken steps to recreate the divination procedure in Virtual Reality, following another ancient tradition of producing inconvenient solutions to problems that never existed.
Students were most recently recorded discussing procuring a virgin sacrifice to further their occult augury practices, although that didn’t end up being too hard to find in the lab.
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