Gross anatomy: Not enough cadavers to go around

July 17, 2007

Students in the UK are having the study on pre-dissected bodies.



Related posts:

  1. Will gross anatomy soon be rendered irrelevant?
  2. Gross anatomy
  3. Virtual gross anatomy
  4. Gross anatomy of the future?
  5. Gross anatomy and breast implants
  6. Nailing anatomy
  7. Street Anatomy


KevinMD.com on Facebook


  Follow on Twitter   Subscribe



{ 7 comments }

1 Greg P July 17, 2007 at 7:56 pm

I went to med school in the late seventies, part of a “pilot” project which was a segment of the class. The rest of the class got the traditional lecture-discussion track, dissections, and so on, we did independent study, and had no dissections at all, no cadavers at all — it was all audiovisual materials.

We managed to survive. The one comedic thing was when we finally got to the clinics and had some strange pronunciations for various things since we’d never heard them from a professor.

2 Anonymous July 17, 2007 at 8:33 pm

Where do medical schools in the U.S. get cadavers for students to dissect, other than people donating their bodies. Surely those are not in great numbers.

3 Anonymous July 17, 2007 at 8:48 pm

Anatomy lab was without the biggest waste of time in medical school. Standing around a cadaver with 3 other people, none of us having a clue about what to do.

And then the hours spent just watching fat being cleaned off…hours and hours of flensing fat, looking for tiny nerves that were long gone.

The alleged benefits of dissection – knowing the body, the anatomy, having an instinctual appreciation for what looks correct and what doesn’t, just didn’t happen. Yes, I saw livers (for example) – from eaten up by mets to rock hard, literally the size of two football balls. Not even close to ‘normal’, and since they were all tanned (’embalmed’) the texture of everything was totally different.

We could have learned more by studying Netter, or using state of the art multimedia…

I think the ideal would be prosected, plasticized cadavers, with a good distribution of ages, races, sexes. All we had were multiply comorbid elderly caucasians

4 Anonymous July 17, 2007 at 8:59 pm

The first two things that come to mind about gross:

1. Our cadaver was a morbidly obese female whose red finger nail polish survived the embalming process. I still find random pieces of cadaver in my copy of Netter, Moore, Agar and Chung. I was careful with my copy of Rohen and Yokochi, which avoided a similar fate.

2. She had a pituitary stalk tumor that caused her to go blind by compressing the optic chiasm.

~Criminallopath~

5 Nurse K July 18, 2007 at 12:31 am

My college has so many backlogged donated cadavers that when I was there, they were advising people not to donate them because they’re running out of storage.

6 Anonymous July 18, 2007 at 4:34 pm

Nurse K:

Well, thats one way to get admitted to medical school.

7 Anonymous July 18, 2007 at 10:04 pm

about the only way for nurse k.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post: The physician-patient relationship: "An endangered species"

Next post: Texas malpractice: "A case were politicians actually delivered"

Site Meter