Last night I had a very long catching-up phone conversation with an old friend of mine who’s currently a medical student at Johns Hopkins. Among other things, I asked him what it was like to dissect a body. He told me many interesting things that I never would have imagined. He said that the bodies were often very fat - he claimed that they hardly ever got a body that was in ideal physical shape, the way they always show them in anatomy diagrams and stuff like Leonardo’s old medical drawings. The bodies were typically old and full of fat. He said that they typically had to cut through many layers of fat before they could ever get to the organs and heart and what have you.
He said the smell was really disgusting (the formaldehyde used to preserve the corpse) and also that they used a hose to suck out liquid and fat particles from the body. He said sometimes the hose would get clogged with fat, and they would have to run water through the hose at high pressure (which would cause the fat to shoot out, sometimes going across the room or hitting another student in the face.) He said most of the students were very mature about cutting open the body but a few of them behaved badly, playing around with bits of tissue and fat, joking about the corpse, etc.
He said the hardest thing was getting started, because there would be no incisions in the body and the students would feel weird about starting in on it; but once they got going he said they really tore up the specimens. Apparently by the end of the session they would really be cut to pieces.
Has anyone here cut open a cadaver? What was it like?
I have but not the whole body most of the time. I was in behavior neuroscience grad school so I mainly focused on the brains and surrounding tissues. I even had a large bucket with five brains beside my desk for class demonstrations. They aren’t gross at all and are much smaller than most people expect. They feel like silly putty after they are preserved. Undergraduates, even girls that looked like they would be really squeamish for most things often stayed after class to handle whole and dissected brains.
The closest I came was witnessing a couple of autopsies off the record when I was a reporter. I’m not very squeamish at all, but I would have had less than no interest in making a cut if asked, just because I wouldn’t know what I was doing and would find that disrespectful of the body.
I haven’t yet, but there is a fair chance that I will have an opportunity to witness an autopsy, and I am anxious to do so. My mother works as a secretary in the autopsy department, and I work as a secretary in pathology. I think I would love to work as a mortician or something along those lines, but for all I know, I wouldn’t be able to handle the reality of working with the dead.
If I do get to see an autopsy, I will definitely post about it.
I took comparative vertebrate anatomy, rather than human anatomy, so most of my dissection experience was with other critters. But a couple of my friends were grad students who taught human anatomy labs, so I’ve spent a little time around cadavers and watched them being worked on a couple of occasions.
Your friend’s experiences seem to jibe loosely with mine. They did smell a bit, they were typically older and I saw a couple that were fairly obese. But again, I never did in any actual cutting myself, so I don’t have much to share in that department.
I have never dissected one, but I have been in the lab where plastination was being performed on body parts (specifically diseased kidneys and a cancerous bladder). That was fascinating.
Fascinating guy who does the process incidentally: I won’t give his name just in case he guards his privacy at all, but he’s a close relative of the singer Otis Redding and looks like an older version of him, and he’s world famous in the field of plastination. He got his start as an undertaking student and he’s a quiet but very nice guy who can be kind of jarring to students and, especially, kids on tours of the facility because like a lot of people who are enthusiastic about their procession he forgets that some people are put off by “dead things”.
His collection- pieces that he has plastinated and that are on display at the medical school where he works- include a uterus containing a perfectly preserved 5 week old embryo (the mother died in a car accident IIRC), several limbs and organs, a chest cavity of a very sick man, and his crown jewel: a set of conjoined twins connected at the liver who died at birth. It’s hard when touching these pieces to realize that “this is not a wax likeness, this is the actual thing”.
His goal when I knew him was to preserve an entire body- a process that had only been done in Germany- but I don’t know if he ever realized the dream. He’s done so many cancerous lungs and diseased hearts that his med school is indefinitely stocked, but they sell them to other med schools and colleges.
For a while I was studying medical illustration, and had to dissect, photograph and illustrate various aspects of a male human arm. It was actually lots of fun, once I got used to it.
Yes, while training to be an X-ray technician (didn’t finish). Subject was oldish guy, very lean, and donated his body for the purpose. I remember his body was kind of cheesy-looking from the preservation, but it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, all the girls handled it just fine, it was the guys who were queasy and asking the face be covered!
I haven’t dissected one, but I got to poke inside quite a few that were already flayed open to reveal the items of interest in the University of Minnesota cadaver lab.
As referenced above, this was part of my training as a Rad Tech.
They were all ages and both sexes. I think most body types were represented.
They didn’t smell or anything. The way they had been prepared, though, left most of the tissue resembling turkey dark meat.
Anatomy lab - no dissecting but we were studying bodies and organs that medical students had been working on.
In my histology rotation for my medical laboratory degree, I assisted in autopsies to a small degree, by weighing and measuring organs, and taking sections for study. It was the most difficult part of my rotation, because it was at a children’s hospital. I was present for a couple of autopsies of fetuses that never made it to term due to deformities, and one infant. I couldn’t stick around for the entire thing for that last one. It was too difficult. I have great respect for the techs and doctors who work there and have to deal with that almost daily.
Both my wife and I have donated our dead bodies to the University of Queensland Anatomy and Physiology Department. So, in a way, I will have contributed to a dissection posthumously.