I did the obligatory one in Gross Anatomy in medical school. He was rather overweight and had an artificial hip, as I recall.
Did ~50 autopsies during residency. Not really my favorite part.
Now, I probably do 1-3 autopsies a year (and that’s 1-3 too many, as far as I’m concerned).]
What’s it like? Well, it depends a lot on the circumstances. A well-preserved med school cadaver is a much different experience from a transplant patient who died mere hours before, or a floater who was found in the San Francisco Bay.
My med school cadaver was not fat; she was a small frail woman who had died of pancreatic cancer. We became rather attached to her and I’d describe the experience of dissecting her as very profound. For many med students this is the first time you have license to touch and dissect real tissue. For most of us the predominant sensation was gratitude, and many of us named our cadavers in an endearing fashion.
Autopsies are quite different, and in some ways creepier initially. Unpreserved tissue is much more real.
Finally, in the ED, cutting into mostly- or pretty-much dead people for various emergency procedures (opening a chest, say, for massive penetrating trauma) is different again.
It’s surprising what we can get used to, and how nearly everything becomes ordinary if you do it often enough.
I’m another one who did it in med school. The gross anatomy cadavers seldom look like the nice pictures in the book. There was one neighboring table whose person had died of pancreatic cancer and the abdominal organs had tumor all over them. So you kind of circulate around the room finding out which tables have interesting pathology and which parts look “normal”. I also did an elective in the medical examiners office which was a very different type of dissection with a whole different set of smells.
I observed (and assisted) with an autopsy as part of my lab tech training, too, as well as working in the histotechnology lab where all the specimens taken off of people during surgery are taken, examined, and stored. The autopsy really was fascinating (the way all those parts are fit together is nothing short of magical), and watching the dissections of the parts in the histo lab was also quite interesting. And yeah, dead bodies smell really, really bad. The combination of formaldehyde and flesh is…kind of ripe, and one-of-a-kind. It smells like nothing else.
One of the interesting things I learned during the autopsy was that skulls are notched when they are removed so they stay in place when they are put back on.
It’s been about 10 years since I’ve been in the cadaver lab. The smell was minimal, and as I recall the preservative was formalin (might have the spelling wrong). Actually, the latex smell of my gloves made me feel queasy, but I had no reaction to the bodies. They had a bucket of brains there, too, and it was fascinating to hold one.
I came across a long-dead cat in a ditch on a hot summer day once while riding my horse. The smell came as surprise to both of us, and the horse nearly jumped out of his skin. All I remember was that it was pungent. I can only imagine the smell of a larger decomposing body. I suppose if med school works out I’ll probably get to find out.
There is nothing quite so rank as the smell of a large body- human is bad and so is seal. For some reason, at least to me herbivore bodies (like a cow or horse) just smell really bad, they don’t get anywhere near as bad as a human. I suppose it could be stomach contents or something.
Ive dissected several. Once I wore the skin from an old man’s hand all day as a glove. It had hair and huge old people freckles all over it.
None of the bodies were extremely obese, but practically all of them were elderly.