Is it possible for somebody to dissect a cadaver without being a doctor or a medical student? What is the price for this privilege?
You feelin OK, Argent?
Quick, hide the knives!
No, I just was curious about it because I read about this happening in Stranger than Fiction, by Chuck Palahniuk.
There are ways to do some of it without being a doctor or a true medical student. I dissected human brains even as a lowly junior in college because I was an intern in a lab that did human brain demonstrations. I carried that one for over three years into graduate school and got to do lots of things with cadavers from the neck up. I am sure other academic labs that specialize in different parts of the body have interns that do something similar. However, whole body dissections for gross anatomy medical school classes are very different. The body is always treated according to a protocol and there is a type of memorial service for the body donors at the end. I don’t think anyone would be allowed to do something like that except under strict supervision. Dissecting pieces is a lot more relaxed.
I know this isn’t really what you’re asking, but students of other health professions also do anatomy lab, including physical therapists and dentists.
Yeah- and some colleges do offer cadaver dissections for their Anatomy classes (graduate and undergraduate I’ve seen), as well. For those, you would just have to have the requisite Biology credits to take the class. Usually, it’s a graduate level course though that gets the cadavers, and the undergraduate courses use cats, but I’ve seen places that will give the undergraduates a Cadaver instead.
So I guess if you REALLY wanted- one way would be to inquire if you could take an Anatomy course at a nearby university or such, and see if you could find one that would allow you to do the dissection. But that’s a good 6months to a year of investment as well as the setting up of making sure you had the Pre-Reqs for it.
When I was in college, a friend who was taking an anatomy class invited me to come along on Saturday and watch him work on an cadaver. He had to get the annoying fiddly adipose tissue removal done, so on Monday they could film his dissection of the nerves and ligament, while he mentioned the names, and where they were routed, or something like that.
So yeah, it’s not too hard to have the right connections, and get to see. But it would take a bit of training, to carefully dissect nerves and connective tissue in an interesting and useful way. Cadavers are, in addition to being former humans who deserve respect, very expensive commodities, so you don’t just get to cut them up willy-nilly.
There wasn’t, for this particular class, any abdominal dissections performed, which is what we’d all be more interested in. Or at least – I’d be more interested in. They might have done a demonstration of that, if they really wanted to, but the purpose of this class was to understand the technique of working with these tissues, and learning the connections of these structures. Not everyone gets to play coroner in college.
EDIT
Or you knowm like Ro0sh just said. Heh.
The Medical College of GA used to offer their gross anatomy course to the public in the summer (for a price, of course). It involves a head-to-toe dissection of an actual cadaver. Usually it was attended by medical students, either overachieving incoming freshmen or underperforming sophmores, but anybody with $1500 could show up and take the course.