I have never dissected a body, but I do know that they look nowhere like the textbook images. It’s all the same-ish color, lots of things are firmly attached to others, stuff is hiding other stuff from view, etc. I understand tracing the major nerves already is fairly difficult.
Also, if, as a student, you’re tasked to find the P parts of an object, there’s a strong tendency to search on when you only have found P-1, and to not go look for a P+1-st when you have found the P-th.
I remember the cadaver labs during the school days. Really hard to spot certain (save for the really large organs which are obvious) unless you know what it is you’re looking for. Sometimes an illustration tells you it should be there but the actual structure is... underwhelming or barely visible/damaged from years of specimen abuse. Can see how things like this can be missed.
How does a muscle go undiscovered for so long? I would have through we’d have dissected, autopsied and studied so many bodies in every way conceivable by now that there wouldn’t be anything else left to find?
Anatomy textbooks aren't anything like real life. They're all colourful, clearly distinguished and clearly labelled, yet any autopsy will reveal a mess of reddish brown that tangles and squishes together. Also remember that human bodies aren't constructed, they're grown, so the idealised version of the textbook isn't what you end up seeing when you cut something open, and what you see when you do that changes each time you do that. It's why cadavers are still used to teach medical students.
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 think you can do fine without dissections. I don't think very many intro to anatomy classes are going to involve everyone getting a human hand to play with.
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.
If anyone wants to get their head around anatomy, beautifully prepared, find ‘Ackland’s Anatomy’. It’s the visual bible. Beautifully prepared dissections from start to finish.
It’s also much cleaner than the particularly tedious process of dissecting a entire human being, most of which consists of slowly stripping back skin and fat to get to the interesting stuff
(Source: with 2 others, slowly dismantled an entire adult human male from whole body down to each individual muscle and tendon over a period of 4 months)
My late wife was a physical therapist and in undergrad she had a gross anatomy class with a cadaver dissection. After the chest cavity was opened, they were supposed to go over the internal organs step by step, but her group instead found a plastic bag inside containing all of the organs. Apparently the autopsy had involved inspecting, weighing, etc. the organs which made for a somewhat confusing discovery once the class got in there.
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.
They don't seem to be doing this to pursue anything other than personal curiosity. And fairly light-hearted curiosity at that -- the tone of the article, to me, sounds more like, "Ooh, nerves are neat!" than someone trying to build a body of knowledge for a larger purpose.
I'm not going to go so far to say that only med students should have access to cadavers... but this article does feel like a rando just cutting someone up for fun, and that feels a bit off to me.
Honestly, from my experiences in medical school, cadavers smell strongly like formaldehyde, and all the tissues are brown, atrophied, and hard to distinguish. I remember realizing my understanding of anatomy (at least abdominal) increased way more from watching surgery on healthy tissue than an entire year of clinical anatomy courses...
Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).
I don't think many soldiers are anatomy experts. Chopping somebody up in combat is different than taking a body apart piece by piece and studying the way the organs are.
Accurate knowledge of human anatomy in the modern era can be credited to the sometimes clandestine dissection of cadavers by doctors and other medical researchers, not the armies who merely chopped people up.
In addition, https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... doesn’t only apply to the outside of persons. The inside varies as much. Locations, sizes, connections, etc. all can vary. As an extreme examples, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91022/5-muscles-you-migh... lists 5 muscles that not every person has.
Also, if, as a student, you’re tasked to find the P parts of an object, there’s a strong tendency to search on when you only have found P-1, and to not go look for a P+1-st when you have found the P-th.
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