I’ve got another one that really sounds like an urban legend.
A friend of mine is in med school, and he had to disect a cadaver. He told me that cadavers are hard for the school to get, so they ‘horde’ them. Basically, they get them when they can, and, according to my friend, they have a facility that is basically a large swimming pool filled with framaldehied (however you spell that one) and bodies. When they need a body, some poor worker has to put on protective gear, wade in, and retrieve one.
I find this VERY hard to believe. If he had said they have a large morgue with freezers, that would be one thing, but this? Sounds like something out of a horror movie.
Anyone been to med school, or know anything about how medical research cadavers are stored?
I can’t find a cite for something this obvious, and I haven’t attended med school, but it sounds so much like an urban legend. Mortuaries and medical examiner’s offices store corpses in chilled boxes. I see no reason why they would do it any different at a medical school, especially not something so ridiculous as storing them in a pool of liquid.
Off the toppa my hed- Formaldehyde. Other than that, I see no reason that medical schools wouldn’t horde cadavers. After a thorough embalming process-unlike funerary embalming appearance is not an issue and medical cadavers often have leathery skin, store them in tanks of preservative. Freezing wouldn’t work. Unless all water is driven out of the tissues, it would turn to ice and expand. This would burst cells and damage the kind of small and delicate things you get cadavers to study. If you did eliminate the water, you’d still have the problem of properly thawing cadavers prior to study- and the problem of medical students getting frostbitten hands during dissections (seriousy, if you’ve ever worked on a refrigerated turkey then you’ve experienced the problem on a smaller scale).
I would think the cadavers would be stored in a single location when not in use (this would allow you to regulate temperature, humidity, etc in that area in order to best preserve them). However, I would think that this would consist of many small tanks so that you don’t have corpses bumping into each other or tissue from one cadaver drifting off and being deposited in the open chest cavity of another.
Semi Hijack-
The preservative in my jar of dead bat is evaporating. What do I do? A friend bought it for me, and it came sealed in the jar. I don’t know for sure what the preservative is. How do I determine that? And how do I replace it?
NOTE- Due to the way my friend was treated by the owner when working at the store, I refuse to give them my business and will not simply by a new dead-bat-inna-jar there.
Mortuaries are only concerned with keeping bodies presentable for a short time. They also care only about the external appearance and odor.
A medical examiner is also concerned with only short term preservation. IANA coroner, pathologist, or any other kind of MD, but I’d assume that embalming might contaminate the findings (like checking for the presence and levels of drugs and alcohol). More, I assume that most of the time the ME is only looking at few things- extract a bullet and confirm it was the cause of death, that kind of thing. An ME is also not honing their surgical technique. They use big, effective tools that do the job quickly.
A medical school is concerned with long term preservation- of as much of the body as possible. The students are honing their skills- they use the same instruments as would be used on a live patient and take their time. If you’re going to have your hands in a corpse for a long time, you want that corpse room temperature.
To me, the only question was ‘one big tank or many small ones’
As I said, I’ve got a bat (I assume common big brown) in a jar of preservative(I assume formaldehyde) it’s held up much better than anything I’ve kept in the freezer. The Smithsonian Museum Of Natural History has a whole wing of specimens preserved in jars of fomaldehyde. The Mutter Museum has a wonderful display of the brains (with attached optic nerves and eyes) of various species, also preserved in fluid.
Formaldehyde has no risk of mechanical failure, power failure, and doesn’t run up the electric bill.
Well, I see substantial evidence for the tank theory. Now has anyone out there actually seen these facilities? I’m sure that they are not all the same… so maybe some low budget operation actually does have a big pool. I want to see THAT on fear factor - ‘for your next challenge, please retrieve these three diving rings from the cadaver pool’.
If you want to read more about medical school cadavers, I highly recommend the book “Stiff: the secret lives of human cadavers.” It includes some info on the storage and use of medical school specimins, and a whole lot more. Well written by journalist Maureen Dowd.
just about every adult member in my family, except my dog, has at least tried medical school (my dog can’t seem to get an ADA accomodation on the MCAT for his paws. As soon as he hears “CAT”, his tail goes all waggly and he starts to lose control.) True, my mom only took the classroom part of the anatomy course, but my dad has 40+ years as a professor of anatomy, and supervised the diener (the person who takes care of the cadavers) all my life. So I guess he kind of makes up for her.
I grew up around cadavers, and have had lifelong interests in medical history and education. I can’t begin to list how much preservation has changed each decade. Where we once pickled them thoroughly to last all through a year-long course, stored them in trash cans and plastic bags, today’s cadavers use the minimum possible preservatives -as little as 1/10th the formalin of the 1950s, supplemented with phenol and other additives, to meet oday’s OSHA air and workplace guidelines (a constant challenge for the lab manager)
This is still enough to make dissecting them completely unlike operating on a life person or autopsying a fresh corpse (textures change), but so little that by the end of a three month course (there’s less time to study basic anatomy now, as medl schools cover more ground), several of the cadavers in a typical class have begun to decompose, and when the time comes to do the craniotomy (usually the last week of dissection), you can expect a few of the brains to spill out in a puddle
Yeah, Bleeeeech! They claim 1% more phenol would be a workplace hazard, but apparently liquified brains aren’t on OSHA’s list.
If you read books about medical education (e.e "The Boys in White, about UMKC’s early days, I think you’ll find that cadavers were stored in tanks in the 1950s, and maybe the early 1960s. Today, such cadaver storage would be useless for modern research, and unacceptable -even illegal- for a dissection lab.
My step-dad, in the '60s, was a mortician for KU Med Center/Med School. I went to work with him during holidays, weekends, summer breaks. It IS true that cadavers are stored in vats filled with a phenol/formaldehyde solution for about six months AFTER embalming for osmosis. There were 3 vats at KU, each one held about 90 cadavers. The cadavers were removed by gantry crane with a hook attached to a harness on the cadavers. I witnessed this first-hand on several occasions. I was only 9 when I did my first embalming, (under my dad’s supervision, of course,) but, this experience I NEVER forgot, and my beloved has told me this is the cause of my PTSD, (Rather than USMC combat.) Any doubts/questions, please write. birdman6058@comcast.net.
Thank you very much coffinman6058. I don’t think that question was actually answered in 2004, making this the rare, great, new poster revives a zombie thread thread.
I stumbled upon this forum/thread while doing research on the subject. I’ve been trying to come to terms with the early trauma of witnessing this stuff at such a young age, and it’s been difficult for a LOT of years.
My mother and step-dad were persons of science, and “enlightenment,” and thought that my sisters, and I, would benefit from the “reality” of life and death, especially in a clinical situation.
The horror of seeing the vat for the first time, is an image I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. When my step-dad talked me through the embalming, I had nightmares for years. The only way I’ve been able to deal with it over the years is to embrace it. I went through the San Fran College of Mortuary Science in the 70s, then, enlisted in the USMC.
Sorry to ramble. The sight of corpses floating in a vat has never left me.
I recommend all her books. *Stiff *is good but so are her others. She’s really got a way with getting into the bizarre without being too banal nor too bizarre.
Aside: A camp I worked last summer had a preserved sheep’s lung that we used in a demonstration for the students: Hook it up to a bellows, and it inflated and deflated quite impressively. Would that have been the process used to produce it? I’d wondered about that, because it was in quite good condition, and still retained all of its flexibility and elasticity, but didn’t smell of preservative at all.
