Fascinating. It is quite shocking to read about our world not so long ago. I did dissection at university from a cadavar donated for education. We attended a service afterwards, prior to the cremation. I was very grateful to have the chance to learn from it in a way that would have been almost impossible using prosections or models.
One of the things that has happened to our society recently, is that we isolate ourselves from the messy details of our actions. In the past, if our society had capital punishment - it was done in public and society was exposed to it. Now, it is done in a private, almost clinical environment. Dissections now days are only ever really carried out in sterile anatomy labs. In the past, everyone who ate meat, probably was familiar with butchering an animal. Now, we eat meat that is nicely pre-packaged and are blissfully unaware of the details. This is the case even with war. In the distant past, if you went to war, it was a bunch or regular people who stabbed or slashed their opponents. Over time this became longer ranged with fire arms, bombs, artillery etc. Now, with no draft, we basically have a warrior class, and with the advent of combat drones, the operator can control a missile drone in a foreign country from their desk in the US.
In college I got to spend a day at a cadaver lab, where the pre-meds taking that class acted as tour guides. It was one of the more meaningful experiences of my education such that I feel everyone should have the opportunity. I learned more about mammalian anatomy in that single experience than from any of the biology labs in which I'd been a student.
Thanks for the TLDR!
For what I know dissections of human body are still restricted in most countries and is not a common form of entertainment.
What a fun epoch Franklin lived in: science experiments was a high society interest that people engage in. Now high-tech-apple-vision rhymes with consumption.
I had no especial antipathy to the cadaver lab in med school. A preserved cadaver holds very little relationship to a real body, outside of the relationships of anatomical landmarks. I -wish- we had had been able to study from prosections.
But digital cadavers completely fail to capture the three dimensional relationship of the components of a body. I have probably every atlas on the market, paper and digital, and I still occasionally go to our affiliated school’s lab to interrogate a body when I need a refresher.
There is nothing even vaguely approaching a replacement yet, though I’ve been hearing about how we can replace real dissections with simulations for literally decades. I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.
Great article. Some of my thoughts and experiences:
-- most medical school cadavers look like jerky and smell weird
-- most medical schools (in the UK at least) do not like students doing dissection; they prefer prosection (where someone competent has already made the cut)
-- it was, for me, an increasingly weird feeling to realise that the images seen on medical imaging -- particularly axial (cross-sectional) t2 weighted MRI images, really really do look like reality, but with the colours in grey and white rather than odd shades of red, white and pink
-- nobody feels emotional about a liver
-- everybody feels emotional about hands, and doesn't expect to when they go in
-- for actually understanding the Latin names of everything and the typical decorative layout of the human body, VR or just plain medical imaging are pretty damn good, arguably better than aforesaid interestingly smelling jerky
-- for actually understanding that your future career will involve dealing with people's children or possibly parents in dire situations, that we are all naked under our clothes (and should just get over it as a society), and that, yes, we are all going to die, the dissection room can't be beat.
There's something about laying hands on flesh that's important. As a medical student at a school that does not practice dissection, I feel envious of my grandfather who learnt his anatomy using a scalpel. We have labs with prosected cadavers, but that leaves much to be wanted.
I participated in a dissection (ex med tech in the Canadian Forces) and the impression that I got is that the room was filled with respect, with everyone being careful to keep the dignity of the cadavers intact at all time.
I spent three days in a cadaver lab with two severed heads. I was helping develop a tool to place a wound dressing in the sinuses after an ethmoidectomy. For most of the time we had cloth draped over most of the head except the nose, but I did end up seeing the severed neck and the faces. You really can’t unsee that.
The facility we used also did animal experiments, which I really don’t want to know about, but there was an amazing photocopied chart taped up in the locker room with diagrams of how to put notches in mouse ears in order to encode numbers on them.
I always wondered before I joined my medical college regarding how our professor will teach us surgery and laparoscopy. In the beginning I was surprised and afraid when I learnt in my first year that the professor of anatomy used the cadavers for this purpose
Also speaking from first hand I remember quite a bit of "disrespect". Jokes were outright common. The vast majority of interactions were respectful of course -- its hard work studying anatomy after all. But TBH many folks in medicine can be quite callous, which I find not unrelated to the task at hand (i.e. dealing with the crazy and brutal facts of us all being mushy living creatures at a much higher rate than most people). Standing in a room full of dead bodies being dissected... isn't really normal. And it takes a toll.
A girlfriend in medical school said she wish she had a cadaver like my body for anatomy class. She said that she and nearly everyone in the class had to cut through inches of fat to get to the organs, also covered in fat. Such bodies may represent today's population better, but she said you could learn better without it.
Do you know any doctors or medical school students? Ask them how well they would have learned about the human body if they didn't have cadavers to learn with.
This does seem counterproductive to me as well. I very much scare away from the idea of learning from cadavers myself. But that makes me all the more appreciative of the people who do. If it weren’t for modern medicine I would be crippled or dead. The benefits heavily outweigh the costs.
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