Gross anatomy: Not enough cadavers to go around

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.

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

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.

about the only way for nurse k.