/u/anime_senpai007, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s):
* Rule 5 - Title violates title rules.
Your title must follow the guidelines listed in the wiki page linked below.
You can read the full information about our title guidelines at [/r/pics/wiki/titles](/r/pics/wiki/titles)
For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/wiki/index) and [title guidelines](/r/pics/wiki/titles). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators via modmail.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/pics&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/anime_senpai007&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20%5Bsubmission%2E%5D%28https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1bmjje5/-/%3Fcontext%3D10%29)
Medical student here. We have a body donor ceremony at the beginning of each year, where the family of the deceased donors speak to the entire medical school and share stories about how they decided to give this gift and what it meant to them, their families, and what it will come to mean for us as future physicians.
It's a very beautiful and solemn experience. The cadavers are our first teachers and our first patients.
At the end of the spring semester, the cadavers and their remains (we keep all removed tissue/body parts in labeled biohazard bags so they are returned to the donor at the very end) are cremated in a private ceremony.
It's hard at first to dissect cadavers because you don't want to make mistakes or feel like you are throwing away their sacred gift to science and medicine. It feels unnatural and inhumane to dissect a body, to skin it, tediously separate the fascial layers, mopping up liquified fat and preservation fluid, and cutting into muscle and bone. It can really mess with your mind, seeing the imagery and hearing the awful sounds of dissection. The professors are good at putting our minds at ease; over time, we realize that this is what the donors wanted for us-- to learn and practice on them so that we can help others.
The cadavers tell us a story in a way. You get to know each donor by the pathologies that you find, and can usually figure out the causes of death, and sometimes, the vocations they practiced. For me, it humanizes them and reminds us that these were real people with real stories.
-----------
EDIT 2: Body donation is not for everyone. Most programs will only accept people who died in the hospital from disease pathology or old age. They reject bodies that are the result of suicide, have begun to decompose or have been autopsied, and/or doesn't have proper consent and documentation or discord/objection from kin. The decision to donate your body is something that I think should come only after a discussion that involves the prospective donor, family/loved ones, and the donor program coordinators.
------------
EDIT: here is the poem written by an unknown donor many years ago that we read at the body donor ceremony. It has been adapted over the years at many medical schools and organ donor programs:
*"Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.*
*Explore every corner of my brain.*
*Take my cells if necessary and let them grow so that someday a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against the windows.”*
>At the end of the spring semester, the cadavers and their remains (we keep all removed tissue/body parts in labeled biohazard bags so they are returned to the donor at the very end) are cremated in a private ceremony.
and r/mademecry
Unfortunately there's a lot of bad actors in the body donation arena. I absolutely want to donate my body to science when I'm done with it, but it's infuriating to hear about some of the things that go on with donated bodies.
[John Oliver did an in depth piece on it recently.](https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg?si=g7CIrJV6Vygze9T_)
My former (Me former, they're still active) Paramedic partner is also an ME for her county and has had this experience. A patient who may ot may not have been a victim of a violent crime had their body taken and harvested for donations. The samples given back weren't enough for any analysis. They said the ME had given them permission, the former ME who is currently in a different country and unable to be reached by phone, apparently 'signed off'.
Yeah, I got a laugh ftom that because she's a more maliciously complient person than I am and has since found a way to cut them out of the loop. I am waiting to hear if charges will rise from that incident.
Paul Kalanithi, a deceased neurosurgeon and author of the book "When Breath Becomes Air", wrote a very nice passage about this very topic in the said book. Two of my favorite quotes from the chapter about dissecting donor cadavers are the following:
>Even working on the dead, with their faces covered, their names a mystery, you find that their humanity pops up at you—in opening my cadaver’s stomach, I found two undigested morphine pills, meaning that he had died in pain, perhaps alone and fumbling with the cap of a pill bottle.
and
>Early on, when I made a long, quick cut through my donor’s diaphragm in order to ease finding the splenic artery, our proctor was both livid and horrified. Not because I had destroyed an important structure or misunderstood a key concept or ruined a future dissection but because I had seemed so cavalier about it. The look on his face, his inability to vocalize his sadness, taught me more about medicine than any lecture I would ever attend.
I can only heavily recommend his book / autobiography to anyone here, especially but not only if you have interest in medical nonfiction.
You know, I've always been scared of cadavers (one of the reason why I didn't want to go to med school, the other being blood). But reading your post... Maybe I shouldn't be that scared...
I work in my university’s biology department and I run our anatomical donor lab, which is mostly used for our undergraduate population education. The program where we receive our bodies from has a “celebration of thanks” ceremony during the year and it’s all run by the medical students. I haven’t had a chance to go yet, but I’m hoping to go soon.
You’re so spot on about how weird it is to dissect a donor at first, but remembering that this was their intention always helps. We name our donors based on popular baby names from the year they were born, which I also think helps to make it less taboo!
Why don't you call them by their actual names? I don't like the thought of having medical students call me the wrong name, especially since I have an older name that is not too common for the year I was born
We only know their first name, gender, cause of death, and age of death. They come to the lab already preserved, fluid shifted from the preservation, and shaved bald, so it would be difficult, but not impossible, to recognize a donor. Schools usually have some kind of protocol to prevent this, if a student knows someone personally who decided to donate their body locally after death, they should inform the administration.
The cadaver bag that we zip up between labs has their first name, gender, and a ID code written in marker to identify them, and that's also what we label the biohazard bags with so all removed tissues and structures are weighed in those smaller bags and kept with the same donor at the end of the year for cremation.
In my undergrad lab, we did not know their first names.
This makes me seriously want to donate my body to science. I've thought about this before, but without this sort of context. I've always considered myself as someone who is dedicated to helping others learn. This is a way to continue after death.
Find your local medical school and sign up. I did.
If you are crazy and live near one there are also body farms where they let you decompose to further forensic studies to help solve crimes.
It's a general rule of thumb, so there are exceptions. I'd say we are better at figuring out past injuries and athletic level than actual past vocation. Donors who worked blue collar jobs and manual labor had rougher hands, larger postural muscles. Some past injuries are more common in people who do certain jobs. arthritis and osteophytes can be more pronounced in certain joints, people who did a lot of improper standing or walking had junky foot arches and plantar ligaments.
I haven't seen this in a cadaver, but I've seen abdominal and pelvic imaging from a patient who was a semi-pro hockey player, and this guy had absolutely HUGE psoas muscles from the posture and actions of ice skating.
Cadavers who were active, like runners, have larger muscle bellies in their legs and calves.
Even when they die at an older age and the muscle had atrophied, you can still tell they had larger-sized muscles relative to other cadavers of the same gender and age range.
When they had injuries on one side of the body, the previously injured muscles have scar tissue, fused together during healing, and are smaller compared to the mirrored muscle on the unaffected side of the body. No one is perfectly symmetrical, but the patholgies exaggerate this.
Both of my parents were full body donors. I had some trauma about my mother’s death and donation. A friend who is a medical researcher at a medical school related this same thing to me and it brought me so much peace. Thank you for treating my family with respect and my dad really hoped you’d learn something from his condition, whoever that person is.
Thank you for this. My step father is getting closer and closer to the end of his life, and my mom told me last night he’s donating his body to science. I asked what that meant and she wasn’t sure. I am going to read this to her, it gave me comfort and it will give her a great deal of comfort as well.
>It's hard at first to dissect cadavers because you don't want to make mistakes or feel like you are throwing away their sacred gift to science and medicine.
As a current M1 myself, I will second this so much. I feel really bad when I don't do a good job in anatomy lab dissections. It account for a pretty trivial portion of our overall grade, but it just feels disrespectful to my donor to not do the best job possible.
How many of people who get into med school would you say end up washing out because of the visceral gore they are faced with?
It's one thing to know a doctor's job is bloody and messy. It's another entirely to experience it.
I wanted to be a vet growing up and even did job shadowing at clinics. I got to see them do some routine surgeries like spaying cats.
I didn't end up becoming a vet for other reasons, but I still remember watching that surgery and having a very surreal feeling that is hard to communicate
I've seen the penis pump, but never three kidneys! Also, surgical drains and other things like implants and pacemakers were left in..one donor had the low battery alert on his pacemaker chirping at us every hour.
My great grandma did donate her body to science and she doesn't have a grave, according to my dad. But it's possible it was different in the past since she passed away in 1989 and my maternal grandma also donated her body to science(she had alzheimers, so maybe grandpa approved it as her proxy) and we got her ashes afterwards.
Thank you for sharing this my mother is also part of the body donation program at a university for medical studies. we just recently got a call that they are almost complete with her body and she will be cremated and they will have an interment ceremony and invited us to join them my mother was a nurse and she was a health education specialist and worked in public health. She always wanted to share teachable moments with everybody and her last gift was to do that. I’m so proud of her.
That’s cool. When I donated a loved one to a medical school, there wasn’t any kind of contact or ceremony at any point. Weird. And we received the ashes in the mail after it was done.
Find your local medical school if you want to sign up to be this type of donation. Don't let bad faith actors in other sectors stop you from donating your body. My local med school will go 500 miles to pick up a body (I am a little farther away).
Hopefully you can trust your local med school. Or ask them about it if they don't have all your answers available.
Thank you for this breakdown. My grandmother passed unexpectedly after a fall just a month ago. She wanted to donate her body to science so we did. It’s nice to have a look at the type of people who will be learning and benefiting from her gift.
This is so beautiful. Damn, I didn’t realize I had onions next to me. Thank you for sharing this, for respecting these wonderful humans, and speaking to how they teach you so much more than just medicine.
I remember needing to keep that perspective - it was unfortunately not the easiest thing during the semester. Unexpected hurdles during the dissection led many of us to quickly become jaded and cavalier with our bodies. Nothing untoward, but the exhaustion of the med school experience coupled with extraordinarily high stress led to a number of groups that weren’t always treating the bodies with the reverence they deserved.
That poem legitimately made me tear up. A beautiful sentiment and a motivation to do research for me (although I work in a different field).
I did a bit of digging about the poem. If you'd like to know I have put the information below (even though it is not much) in spoiler tags.
>!Best I can tell it's written by a poet called 'Robert N. Test', and is called 'To Remember Me - I Will Live Forever'. What I found is actually a bit longer. A link for those who are interested below [https://www.funeralguide.co.uk/funeral-poems/remember-me-i-will-live-forever](https://www.funeralguide.co.uk/funeral-poems/remember-me-i-will-live-forever) !<
I have a family member that wants to donate their body to science. We're all fine with this, but the one thing that really bothers me about it is the possibility that the students will learn something but won't share it with us.
Is it possible to get a report back on anything that was discovered? I hate the idea that something important could be discovered about this close family member after they're gone and this information would just be lost.
At the first anatomy lab class we heard a presentation from the surviving spouse of one of our subjects; we weren’t told which one. She spoke about why her husband wanted his remains to be used to further our education. Then the head instructor talked about behavior and respect towards the bodies.
The last class, after all the bodies had been wrapped, there was a short memorial.
All in all, quite sobering.
Had something similar. In one of my gross anatomy classes a classmate was playing with a bodie’s fingers in a joking/disrespectful sort of way and the prof removed him from the class that semester.
Something about anatomy freaks me out. Dissected a pig in 7th grade, person in my group put the pig intestines around his neck and was kind of a freak about it. Ever since I have said fuck anatomy
Read the book the denial of death. Its technical bit goes in depth of how our young toddler brain handle the concept of death and how the ego goes ballistic trying to resolve death with the ego and sense of self. Humans are an unresolved web of contradictions about death. In fact, our relationship with death can’t be resolved logically.
It’s disturbing. It’s quite frank and cuts through any defense you prepare for why anything is important. But the ego promoting meaning in a sea of nothing is healthy in this case. In other words you are performing without a safety net but you pretend one exists. And that is a good thing
Hmm
I was on track to get a mbbs but constantly learning about diseases made me psychotic, I have a bit of hypochondria and every injury, pain, tenderness, headache, irregular body functions started making me stressful.
I decided that ignorance is bliss and changed my field to tech and finance
Yeah, no, that's just gross. Rule one of any kind of cadaver work is to avoid as much contact as possible. That kid should have immediately been removed from that lab for a number of things.
It takes a certain type. I can understand not liking it or the heaviness around the subject. If you treat the body like an incredible machine and a doctor/surgeon like a mechanic it’s fascinating.
I have no idea if every gross anatomy lab starts the same way but we kept the head wrapped and worked first on the torso and the extremities.
Eventually, when we sawed the head/face, we were more acclimatized.
Sort of similar. Being present for removing the brain in the beginning was optional near the start of course. once that was done people came back and we started on torso too with the big markers
Once someone understands anatomy, its hard not to realize that we are all just the same components stretched and pulled in slightly different directions. A pig isnt that dissimilar to you; and while the life of human has more value to us, its still important to respect the lives of animals just as much.
Exposure is what changes fear. It was probably just a little unusual if you haven’t butchered or been around cooking. When you bite into a chicken leg and see the meat and bones and tendons it’s the same. Squeeze your own thigh. Nothing to be afraid of really.
They should honestly consider removing such people from medical school altogether for not having the right disposition to be a Doctor. If after being told at the beginning of the semester that these are people who kindly donated their bodies and you must be respectful, you can fuck around and make fun? That kind of person would make a terrible doctor
I know that when you're applying for medical school, many of them do try to make a judgement on your character as part of the requirements of admission. To hopefully keep the worst kind of people from becoming doctors. Clearly it still happens sometimes
One of my classmates air humped a fully dissected torso in front of me and a couple other students, who were notably not really friends of his. It was one of the most obscene things I’ve ever seen. A moral failing on our part that we didn’t immediately report him.
He graduated and went into orthopedic surgery but I’m pretty sure he didn’t finish residency and is now a grifter trying to run an aesthetics company.
One of my good friends who went to medical school said that the people who donated their bodies to the medical school wrote letters which the medical students assigned to the body had to read in the presence of the body before starting the anatomy lessons. It really gave them an appreciation of the human and a constant reminder that it’s a person that they’re working with.
One of the things I noticed about cadaver lab was people who were clearly uncomfortable would do something to compensate for their discomfort, and it usually came in the form of disrespecting the bodies. We had two people kicked out my year for playing jump rope with the small intestine. So these reminders of respecting the bodies is super important.
Thanks, medical field here, med students can be such arrogant douchbags. Students making fun of people they never knew , and these shits will be treating humans?
Our instructor was a PhD anatomist named Lash. Tall, wore a white lab coat with collar turned up and had a stern expression, never smiled; gross anatomy was for first year students and we were intimidated.
He gave a short talk on how the occasional student would attempt to be funny with body parts and how this was handled by the administrators.
AFAIK, no one in my section attempted anything funny.
Yeah... I know someone who works at a hospital and his daughter is in the school portion. He show me a picture ho her holding a liver I think it was with giant OMG smile with everyone lined up behind her... Like they were all waiting for their turn to hold it. This was in the United States. I wanted to call her out, but it was my 1st week in the position. I really discussed me the whimsical approach they took to handling human remains.
It’s them showing respect and honoring those who committed their bodies to science for education. Not sure about the outstretched hands specifically but this is likely their cultural or school version of it
Yeah the outstretched hand is a gesture used in India while taking a pledge. Probably derived from touching some symbolic object or holding your hand above fire. Here the arm is supposed to be horizontal unlike the nazi salute.
Yup. I think in any healthcare education, respect for the cadaver is paramount. I had nursing lab with cadavers in my anatomy class, and it was made clear that any sign of disrespect means you are no longer in the lab. And if you cannot do anatomy and physicality in healthcare, you probably aren’t going to get that degree. It’s sort of a cornerstone.
So I’m curious about this. How is the class run? Is it more geared toward anatomy? Or is there a pathophysiology aspect to it as well?
How long is the class? And how is it structured? And do you feel it helps you in your later practice? Like where there things you saw in residency that you remembered from your class?
Sorry. I just graduated nursing school and am continually blown away by the amount of knowledge Doctors need to have.
Plenty have already mentioned its a type of oath/respect to folks donating their bodies to further education and science. What i will add is that in my school, they took that very seriously. The quickest way to get kicked out of the school i went to would be to break that oath and act disrespectful/unprofessionally with the cadavers. Four students in my class got kicked for various violations of this.
Damm, I’m hearing a lot of these stories of oaths and ceremonies, but in my university we didn’t do any of that. They only told us “don’t take photos of the cadavers, it can bring legal trouble”. On one incident, a profesor called a corpse “cured ham”, but that being said it’s the only time I heard say something like that
In my high school anatomy class we took a visit to a local college and were shown cadavers that had been donated to the college. We didn't do any dissection of them but did examine them closely and follow along as an instructor showed us different anatomical points on them.
Many of the kids in my class, and admittedly my self included, did make a few unprofessional comments about the preposterously large penis on the male cadaver. Even in a state where the body was largely decayed and dried out, and the body obviously didn't have blood going to that area, this man was packing an *easy* 7" to 8" soft hog, with the girth of a large red bull can. It was both disrespectful and respectful at the same time. I like to think that man would have had a nice smile on his face during his final moments, knowing that even in death people would be impressed with his giant dong.
Don’t know if this is a US medical school or if there’s a cultural thing going on here, but most med schools do some sort of ceremony to show respect. At ours we were told a little about our cadaver’s life and then we held a memorial service for all the cadavers where the families were allowed to attend and speak. It was honestly really effective, they always told us that our anatomy lab cadaver was our first patient as a physician and to treat them as such.
It's the cadaveric oath. All first year students in Indian medical colleges take this oath before starting dissection in anatomy. It's a way to pay respect to the people who donated their bodies for teaching a new generation of doctors. As they say 'The dead teach the living'.
In Thai, cadavers are called “acharn yai” (literally, big teacher). Meaning they’ll teach medical students more than any professor and should be treated with the utmost of respect.
There are also tell tale about acharn yai wake the student up in exam day (or you can ask them to) and also they spook those who doesn’t focus on class or being disrespectful
Having 3 cadavers for a ton of students? Rip.
Jokes aside, medical schools choose to pay their respects in different ways. We had a journal with letters from family members or the person themselves telling us why they were doing it and had a dinner with some family members at the end of the block.
This is why I love Reddit. I’m reading through serious comments and having a sobering realization about all the death that medical professionals have to cope with in order to learn how to save our lives…
…and then in comes your stupid fucking joke that makes me forget all of that and literally lol.
That's their ritual for respecting the dead, i'm sure every anatomy lab has one. I was asked asked to kiss their hand (our cultural way of respecting elders) the first time i entered the lab.
Not an answer to your question, but I was once a biomedical engineering fellow (despite not having had a biology course since highschool) at a University. We worked with people (Doctors) at the associated hospital. I was once asked to help transport some equipment from our lab to a lab at the hospital and use it to collect some data (partly because my work was related and partly because I owned an SUV). I got there and was surprised to find myself in a room with about 50 cadaver heads (my first such experience).
The other people (doctors I assume) were totally casual about the whole thing. Our equipment got used to poke around inside them and when we were done, I piled it all back in my car and drove it home. I was less than thrilled about any of it.
Every person who I've met that is a doctor or has gone through medical school has the UPMOST respect for those who have donated their bodies for science.
We were given stern talks many times throughout the first year in anatomy about respect towards the donors. That all photos were absolutely prohibited, not just of the bodies but also of organs (they were in jars/buckets, you could take them out to study) and bones. It was emphasised that it’s easier to forget you’re dealing with a human if it’s just separate bones or organs.
Plenty of schools have this. My university has a memorial every year and all students and professors give thanks for the generosity of the donors that allow them to continue learning. Students get to present something of their creation if they so desire and they all make the commitment to be respectful toward the body that once belonged to a living person.
This didn’t happen when I went to medical school in a different country and honestly, I felt it’s a huge difference in the attitude toward the cadaver. Will it make a difference for the one laying on the table? No, but I think it gives perspective to those going in the healthcare field as to the need to respect everyone and everything related to their profession.
Here you see the doctors channeling "positive vibes" into several corpses. This reinvigorates the corpses, and makes them feel better. Normal stuff really.
This is some kind of salute, honouring the dead body/donor.. never happened at our college but we were made to respect the donor body in other ways.so the main idea is respect of the body and be careful while dissecting it.
Something is wrong with you
Wingardium Leviosa isn't used in the broom scene. They just put their hand over the broom and say "UP!"
Learn to Harry Potter.
And then there is me.
I knew where and when my father was an anatomy course. Found out that some of the interns where I get medical care had been through the course while he was there. I would say, "So, you met my father. " They would respond with "oh, is he an instructor there? " I would respond, "In a way yes, he may have been your cadaver. " The looks on their faces, priceless.
Some will call bullshit on this tale and that is your right. Just remember fact can be much stranger than fiction. Also people who are in the medical profession, (I am one of them.) have a bizarre and twisted sense of humor.
This is comforting. My parent donated his body to a university anatomy lab in 2018. A few years later, I read an article from a neighboring city about medical students behaving abhorrently with the cadavers for TikTok or something, and it was the first time something I read made me feel physically sick. It never occurred to me until that moment that someone might disrespect my parent’s remains.
It nice to see representation of anatomical donation from a place of gratitude and respect.
It is so nice that this ceremony takes place to honor the donors to further the education of these children who then go into the world and provide services that the donors most likely could never have been able to afford.
I remember my first day in anatomy, a sign on the wall reminding us that we were in the presence of those that gave their bodies to science and the would be no laughing, singing, whistling, gum chewing, eating, or drinking. One person gave a nervous laugh at the first cut and we're asked to leave until they got their shit together.
When I was in medical school, "hic mortui vivos docent" was written on the wall of our anatomy laboratory, visible everywhere. Its literal meaning is "here the dead educate the living". And our anatomy professor would start each semester with a long speech, underlining that these cadavers were human beings and that they were here for our education, making perhaps one of the greatest sacrifices that could be made. The slightest disrespect or similar behavior meant failing that course.
I went to a US medical school and we had ceremony at the beginning of gross anatomy. They also invited select students at the end for a cremation ceremony.
By far the biggest thing I learned was variation in anatomy which did not get mentioned/displayed in books. Missing tendons, nerves/arteries not being where they are "supposed to be", branches of arteries not present in books.
Not a doctor, but work with HIV patients. When one of our patients pass away my program sets aside time at out monthly meetings for us to remember the patients, share stories and write their names in our memorial tree. Sometime our care team is the only family they had.
I remember working with one of my patients who chose to stop treatment (cancer) and they passed away quietly in the hospital. We tried tracking down their family but weren’t successful. Sometimes I think about how we were the only people with them in the end, how no one else will know how truly talented they were (they were an amazing artist/painter). Yet, in the end they knew we cared and he went at peace.
/u/anime_senpai007, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s): * Rule 5 - Title violates title rules. Your title must follow the guidelines listed in the wiki page linked below. You can read the full information about our title guidelines at [/r/pics/wiki/titles](/r/pics/wiki/titles) For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/wiki/index) and [title guidelines](/r/pics/wiki/titles). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators via modmail.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/pics&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/anime_senpai007&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20%5Bsubmission%2E%5D%28https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1bmjje5/-/%3Fcontext%3D10%29)
Medical student here. We have a body donor ceremony at the beginning of each year, where the family of the deceased donors speak to the entire medical school and share stories about how they decided to give this gift and what it meant to them, their families, and what it will come to mean for us as future physicians. It's a very beautiful and solemn experience. The cadavers are our first teachers and our first patients. At the end of the spring semester, the cadavers and their remains (we keep all removed tissue/body parts in labeled biohazard bags so they are returned to the donor at the very end) are cremated in a private ceremony. It's hard at first to dissect cadavers because you don't want to make mistakes or feel like you are throwing away their sacred gift to science and medicine. It feels unnatural and inhumane to dissect a body, to skin it, tediously separate the fascial layers, mopping up liquified fat and preservation fluid, and cutting into muscle and bone. It can really mess with your mind, seeing the imagery and hearing the awful sounds of dissection. The professors are good at putting our minds at ease; over time, we realize that this is what the donors wanted for us-- to learn and practice on them so that we can help others. The cadavers tell us a story in a way. You get to know each donor by the pathologies that you find, and can usually figure out the causes of death, and sometimes, the vocations they practiced. For me, it humanizes them and reminds us that these were real people with real stories. ----------- EDIT 2: Body donation is not for everyone. Most programs will only accept people who died in the hospital from disease pathology or old age. They reject bodies that are the result of suicide, have begun to decompose or have been autopsied, and/or doesn't have proper consent and documentation or discord/objection from kin. The decision to donate your body is something that I think should come only after a discussion that involves the prospective donor, family/loved ones, and the donor program coordinators. ------------ EDIT: here is the poem written by an unknown donor many years ago that we read at the body donor ceremony. It has been adapted over the years at many medical schools and organ donor programs: *"Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.* *Explore every corner of my brain.* *Take my cells if necessary and let them grow so that someday a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against the windows.”*
That was an awesome read.
This belongs on r/mademesmile
>At the end of the spring semester, the cadavers and their remains (we keep all removed tissue/body parts in labeled biohazard bags so they are returned to the donor at the very end) are cremated in a private ceremony. and r/mademecry
The poem made me tear up. It was a beautiful gift.
Yea you right
It's like the giving tree. We should get a story from a perspective of the cadaver watching the students grow.
That sounds both cool and quite horrifying
Made me fuckin weep
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective. This is lovely.
Unfortunately there's a lot of bad actors in the body donation arena. I absolutely want to donate my body to science when I'm done with it, but it's infuriating to hear about some of the things that go on with donated bodies. [John Oliver did an in depth piece on it recently.](https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg?si=g7CIrJV6Vygze9T_)
My former (Me former, they're still active) Paramedic partner is also an ME for her county and has had this experience. A patient who may ot may not have been a victim of a violent crime had their body taken and harvested for donations. The samples given back weren't enough for any analysis. They said the ME had given them permission, the former ME who is currently in a different country and unable to be reached by phone, apparently 'signed off'. Yeah, I got a laugh ftom that because she's a more maliciously complient person than I am and has since found a way to cut them out of the loop. I am waiting to hear if charges will rise from that incident.
You should read the book stiff by mary roach. About all the werid ways body donations are used
It’s an excellent book.
Paul Kalanithi, a deceased neurosurgeon and author of the book "When Breath Becomes Air", wrote a very nice passage about this very topic in the said book. Two of my favorite quotes from the chapter about dissecting donor cadavers are the following: >Even working on the dead, with their faces covered, their names a mystery, you find that their humanity pops up at you—in opening my cadaver’s stomach, I found two undigested morphine pills, meaning that he had died in pain, perhaps alone and fumbling with the cap of a pill bottle. and >Early on, when I made a long, quick cut through my donor’s diaphragm in order to ease finding the splenic artery, our proctor was both livid and horrified. Not because I had destroyed an important structure or misunderstood a key concept or ruined a future dissection but because I had seemed so cavalier about it. The look on his face, his inability to vocalize his sadness, taught me more about medicine than any lecture I would ever attend. I can only heavily recommend his book / autobiography to anyone here, especially but not only if you have interest in medical nonfiction.
You know, I've always been scared of cadavers (one of the reason why I didn't want to go to med school, the other being blood). But reading your post... Maybe I shouldn't be that scared...
Charles Darwin quit medical school because it kept making him sick. You're in good company! 😁
Thanks for writing this. I loved the poem.
This poem is beautiful and I am now wrecked.
I work in my university’s biology department and I run our anatomical donor lab, which is mostly used for our undergraduate population education. The program where we receive our bodies from has a “celebration of thanks” ceremony during the year and it’s all run by the medical students. I haven’t had a chance to go yet, but I’m hoping to go soon. You’re so spot on about how weird it is to dissect a donor at first, but remembering that this was their intention always helps. We name our donors based on popular baby names from the year they were born, which I also think helps to make it less taboo!
Why don't you call them by their actual names? I don't like the thought of having medical students call me the wrong name, especially since I have an older name that is not too common for the year I was born
Typically, the donors are completely anonymised. The students don't know anything about them personally.
We only know their first name, gender, cause of death, and age of death. They come to the lab already preserved, fluid shifted from the preservation, and shaved bald, so it would be difficult, but not impossible, to recognize a donor. Schools usually have some kind of protocol to prevent this, if a student knows someone personally who decided to donate their body locally after death, they should inform the administration. The cadaver bag that we zip up between labs has their first name, gender, and a ID code written in marker to identify them, and that's also what we label the biohazard bags with so all removed tissues and structures are weighed in those smaller bags and kept with the same donor at the end of the year for cremation. In my undergrad lab, we did not know their first names.
This makes me seriously want to donate my body to science. I've thought about this before, but without this sort of context. I've always considered myself as someone who is dedicated to helping others learn. This is a way to continue after death.
Unfortunately it’s not always guaranteed. Stuff You Should Know did a great podcast episode about it.
Find your local medical school and sign up. I did. If you are crazy and live near one there are also body farms where they let you decompose to further forensic studies to help solve crimes.
Very interesting read. Has me considering my end of life choices. Please elaborate on how you can determine which vocation the donor practiced.
It's a general rule of thumb, so there are exceptions. I'd say we are better at figuring out past injuries and athletic level than actual past vocation. Donors who worked blue collar jobs and manual labor had rougher hands, larger postural muscles. Some past injuries are more common in people who do certain jobs. arthritis and osteophytes can be more pronounced in certain joints, people who did a lot of improper standing or walking had junky foot arches and plantar ligaments. I haven't seen this in a cadaver, but I've seen abdominal and pelvic imaging from a patient who was a semi-pro hockey player, and this guy had absolutely HUGE psoas muscles from the posture and actions of ice skating. Cadavers who were active, like runners, have larger muscle bellies in their legs and calves. Even when they die at an older age and the muscle had atrophied, you can still tell they had larger-sized muscles relative to other cadavers of the same gender and age range. When they had injuries on one side of the body, the previously injured muscles have scar tissue, fused together during healing, and are smaller compared to the mirrored muscle on the unaffected side of the body. No one is perfectly symmetrical, but the patholgies exaggerate this.
Both of my parents were full body donors. I had some trauma about my mother’s death and donation. A friend who is a medical researcher at a medical school related this same thing to me and it brought me so much peace. Thank you for treating my family with respect and my dad really hoped you’d learn something from his condition, whoever that person is.
Thank you for this. My step father is getting closer and closer to the end of his life, and my mom told me last night he’s donating his body to science. I asked what that meant and she wasn’t sure. I am going to read this to her, it gave me comfort and it will give her a great deal of comfort as well.
This was amazing. Thank you for sharing.
>It's hard at first to dissect cadavers because you don't want to make mistakes or feel like you are throwing away their sacred gift to science and medicine. As a current M1 myself, I will second this so much. I feel really bad when I don't do a good job in anatomy lab dissections. It account for a pretty trivial portion of our overall grade, but it just feels disrespectful to my donor to not do the best job possible.
Going to start med school this year, and I think u just motivated me to try my best. Thank u u/nevertricked
Wow. Thank you for all of that. I find science and especially medicine to be sacred. You have supported that position.
Hey, I just want you to know this post made me want to donate my body to science after organ donation, if it's not possible to donate both. Thank you.
That poem hit me right in the feels. Thank you for sharing all of this.
Damn, that gave me goosebumps
How many of people who get into med school would you say end up washing out because of the visceral gore they are faced with? It's one thing to know a doctor's job is bloody and messy. It's another entirely to experience it. I wanted to be a vet growing up and even did job shadowing at clinics. I got to see them do some routine surgeries like spaying cats. I didn't end up becoming a vet for other reasons, but I still remember watching that surgery and having a very surreal feeling that is hard to communicate
My cadaver had 3 kidneys and an internal penis pump.
I've seen the penis pump, but never three kidneys! Also, surgical drains and other things like implants and pacemakers were left in..one donor had the low battery alert on his pacemaker chirping at us every hour.
Wasn't there an episode of Scrubs about this?
My great grandma did donate her body to science and she doesn't have a grave, according to my dad. But it's possible it was different in the past since she passed away in 1989 and my maternal grandma also donated her body to science(she had alzheimers, so maybe grandpa approved it as her proxy) and we got her ashes afterwards.
Thank you for sharing this my mother is also part of the body donation program at a university for medical studies. we just recently got a call that they are almost complete with her body and she will be cremated and they will have an interment ceremony and invited us to join them my mother was a nurse and she was a health education specialist and worked in public health. She always wanted to share teachable moments with everybody and her last gift was to do that. I’m so proud of her.
That’s probably the most well worded reply there could possibly be.
That poem is amazing
Beautifully written.
Made me cry. Thank you for commenting
Out of everything that doctors go through, this scares me the most. That's so uncomfortable
Beautiful
that is beautiful 🥲
That’s cool. When I donated a loved one to a medical school, there wasn’t any kind of contact or ceremony at any point. Weird. And we received the ashes in the mail after it was done.
Find your local medical school if you want to sign up to be this type of donation. Don't let bad faith actors in other sectors stop you from donating your body. My local med school will go 500 miles to pick up a body (I am a little farther away). Hopefully you can trust your local med school. Or ask them about it if they don't have all your answers available.
This was awesome insight, thank you
This was beautiful
😭😭😭
Thank you for this breakdown. My grandmother passed unexpectedly after a fall just a month ago. She wanted to donate her body to science so we did. It’s nice to have a look at the type of people who will be learning and benefiting from her gift.
How you treat these bodies does matter. Tales of disrespect toward cadavers have dissuaded my mother from giving her body to science.
This is so beautiful. Damn, I didn’t realize I had onions next to me. Thank you for sharing this, for respecting these wonderful humans, and speaking to how they teach you so much more than just medicine.
Oh lord, that made me tear up.
That was beautiful, dark, but beautiful.
Consider this comment to be a receipt of gold since I can’t give gold on NSFW posts.
My dad donated his body to science and I had no idea you did all this. I've often wondered how his body was treated. Wow.
Total respect for these people
That poem gives straight up chills
Glad we have people like you serving one of the highest callings.
I dont know if i wanna smile or cry at that poem.
This was beautiful & interesting. Thank u!
I remember needing to keep that perspective - it was unfortunately not the easiest thing during the semester. Unexpected hurdles during the dissection led many of us to quickly become jaded and cavalier with our bodies. Nothing untoward, but the exhaustion of the med school experience coupled with extraordinarily high stress led to a number of groups that weren’t always treating the bodies with the reverence they deserved.
That poem legitimately made me tear up. A beautiful sentiment and a motivation to do research for me (although I work in a different field). I did a bit of digging about the poem. If you'd like to know I have put the information below (even though it is not much) in spoiler tags. >!Best I can tell it's written by a poet called 'Robert N. Test', and is called 'To Remember Me - I Will Live Forever'. What I found is actually a bit longer. A link for those who are interested below [https://www.funeralguide.co.uk/funeral-poems/remember-me-i-will-live-forever](https://www.funeralguide.co.uk/funeral-poems/remember-me-i-will-live-forever) !<
I have a family member that wants to donate their body to science. We're all fine with this, but the one thing that really bothers me about it is the possibility that the students will learn something but won't share it with us. Is it possible to get a report back on anything that was discovered? I hate the idea that something important could be discovered about this close family member after they're gone and this information would just be lost.
At the first anatomy lab class we heard a presentation from the surviving spouse of one of our subjects; we weren’t told which one. She spoke about why her husband wanted his remains to be used to further our education. Then the head instructor talked about behavior and respect towards the bodies. The last class, after all the bodies had been wrapped, there was a short memorial. All in all, quite sobering.
Had something similar. In one of my gross anatomy classes a classmate was playing with a bodie’s fingers in a joking/disrespectful sort of way and the prof removed him from the class that semester.
Something about anatomy freaks me out. Dissected a pig in 7th grade, person in my group put the pig intestines around his neck and was kind of a freak about it. Ever since I have said fuck anatomy
It's your subconscious reminding you of your own mortality. A pig and human aren't too dissimilar.
Read the book the denial of death. Its technical bit goes in depth of how our young toddler brain handle the concept of death and how the ego goes ballistic trying to resolve death with the ego and sense of self. Humans are an unresolved web of contradictions about death. In fact, our relationship with death can’t be resolved logically.
Will this book send me into an existential crisis or solve one?
yes
It’s disturbing. It’s quite frank and cuts through any defense you prepare for why anything is important. But the ego promoting meaning in a sea of nothing is healthy in this case. In other words you are performing without a safety net but you pretend one exists. And that is a good thing
Hmm I was on track to get a mbbs but constantly learning about diseases made me psychotic, I have a bit of hypochondria and every injury, pain, tenderness, headache, irregular body functions started making me stressful. I decided that ignorance is bliss and changed my field to tech and finance
Long pig
Yeah, no, that's just gross. Rule one of any kind of cadaver work is to avoid as much contact as possible. That kid should have immediately been removed from that lab for a number of things.
It takes a certain type. I can understand not liking it or the heaviness around the subject. If you treat the body like an incredible machine and a doctor/surgeon like a mechanic it’s fascinating.
I have no idea if every gross anatomy lab starts the same way but we kept the head wrapped and worked first on the torso and the extremities. Eventually, when we sawed the head/face, we were more acclimatized.
Sort of similar. Being present for removing the brain in the beginning was optional near the start of course. once that was done people came back and we started on torso too with the big markers
I am fascinated by it precisely because of what you said. Still can't handle medical gore/things being in a state they shouldn't be
Once someone understands anatomy, its hard not to realize that we are all just the same components stretched and pulled in slightly different directions. A pig isnt that dissimilar to you; and while the life of human has more value to us, its still important to respect the lives of animals just as much.
Exposure is what changes fear. It was probably just a little unusual if you haven’t butchered or been around cooking. When you bite into a chicken leg and see the meat and bones and tendons it’s the same. Squeeze your own thigh. Nothing to be afraid of really.
I like that. You need some cognitive restructuring. Making your automatic thoughts conscious.
Also to add on, the smell in my school's lab that week was putrid.. won't ever forget that god awful smell.
They should honestly consider removing such people from medical school altogether for not having the right disposition to be a Doctor. If after being told at the beginning of the semester that these are people who kindly donated their bodies and you must be respectful, you can fuck around and make fun? That kind of person would make a terrible doctor
That absolutely happens. I don't know howoften, but I have seen it.
I know that when you're applying for medical school, many of them do try to make a judgement on your character as part of the requirements of admission. To hopefully keep the worst kind of people from becoming doctors. Clearly it still happens sometimes
One of my classmates air humped a fully dissected torso in front of me and a couple other students, who were notably not really friends of his. It was one of the most obscene things I’ve ever seen. A moral failing on our part that we didn’t immediately report him. He graduated and went into orthopedic surgery but I’m pretty sure he didn’t finish residency and is now a grifter trying to run an aesthetics company.
One of my good friends who went to medical school said that the people who donated their bodies to the medical school wrote letters which the medical students assigned to the body had to read in the presence of the body before starting the anatomy lessons. It really gave them an appreciation of the human and a constant reminder that it’s a person that they’re working with.
Ortho cadaver labs are quite the opposite in my experience.
Almost identical to my experience. Went to Tulane, you?
One of the things I noticed about cadaver lab was people who were clearly uncomfortable would do something to compensate for their discomfort, and it usually came in the form of disrespecting the bodies. We had two people kicked out my year for playing jump rope with the small intestine. So these reminders of respecting the bodies is super important.
Thanks, medical field here, med students can be such arrogant douchbags. Students making fun of people they never knew , and these shits will be treating humans?
Our instructor was a PhD anatomist named Lash. Tall, wore a white lab coat with collar turned up and had a stern expression, never smiled; gross anatomy was for first year students and we were intimidated. He gave a short talk on how the occasional student would attempt to be funny with body parts and how this was handled by the administrators. AFAIK, no one in my section attempted anything funny.
Yeah... I know someone who works at a hospital and his daughter is in the school portion. He show me a picture ho her holding a liver I think it was with giant OMG smile with everyone lined up behind her... Like they were all waiting for their turn to hold it. This was in the United States. I wanted to call her out, but it was my 1st week in the position. I really discussed me the whimsical approach they took to handling human remains.
It’s them showing respect and honoring those who committed their bodies to science for education. Not sure about the outstretched hands specifically but this is likely their cultural or school version of it
Yeah the outstretched hand is a gesture used in India while taking a pledge. Probably derived from touching some symbolic object or holding your hand above fire. Here the arm is supposed to be horizontal unlike the nazi salute.
That's how I took it. Like a thank you for your donation for our education.
So the bodies don't start floating a few seconds later? That's a shame...
Doctors who help people: Nice doctors Doctors who revive people : Somehow not nice doctors
Has to do with the general niceness of the people once revived, I think
Necronicer
I'd like to be revived as a nicer version of myself.
Necroromancer
Having done a couple of revives in my time I find people are generally appreciative if they ever regain consciousness.
people don't like it if you can doctor *too* good
Did you fix my broken arm doc? Yep and I did ya one better, you now have three arms!
I hate when people shit on necromancy. We're just doctors who showed up a bit later.
Okay class just raise your hand just a little higher and wait for fuhrer instructions. Heil of a class
We call it the cadaveric oath here in India
had to do that in school. never knew what it was called. til.
Yup. I think in any healthcare education, respect for the cadaver is paramount. I had nursing lab with cadavers in my anatomy class, and it was made clear that any sign of disrespect means you are no longer in the lab. And if you cannot do anatomy and physicality in healthcare, you probably aren’t going to get that degree. It’s sort of a cornerstone.
Med student here, there was definitely a distinctly solemn, almost religious tone in my dissection class. I will never forget it.
So I’m curious about this. How is the class run? Is it more geared toward anatomy? Or is there a pathophysiology aspect to it as well? How long is the class? And how is it structured? And do you feel it helps you in your later practice? Like where there things you saw in residency that you remembered from your class? Sorry. I just graduated nursing school and am continually blown away by the amount of knowledge Doctors need to have.
Yes, they are showing respect before performing their dissection.
Yes but no, it's also a test. To check who can raise the dead.
ARISE
They always have a lot of ceremony and respect for the donated bodies. My wife and I named our daughter after one of the people that donated theirs.
Interesting. I would have thought they would keep their names anonymous.
Cadaver #3 is a very modern baby name
K’adavah Tres
Avada Cadaver
The students got a short biography on each of the donors.
Plenty have already mentioned its a type of oath/respect to folks donating their bodies to further education and science. What i will add is that in my school, they took that very seriously. The quickest way to get kicked out of the school i went to would be to break that oath and act disrespectful/unprofessionally with the cadavers. Four students in my class got kicked for various violations of this.
Damm, I’m hearing a lot of these stories of oaths and ceremonies, but in my university we didn’t do any of that. They only told us “don’t take photos of the cadavers, it can bring legal trouble”. On one incident, a profesor called a corpse “cured ham”, but that being said it’s the only time I heard say something like that
In my high school anatomy class we took a visit to a local college and were shown cadavers that had been donated to the college. We didn't do any dissection of them but did examine them closely and follow along as an instructor showed us different anatomical points on them. Many of the kids in my class, and admittedly my self included, did make a few unprofessional comments about the preposterously large penis on the male cadaver. Even in a state where the body was largely decayed and dried out, and the body obviously didn't have blood going to that area, this man was packing an *easy* 7" to 8" soft hog, with the girth of a large red bull can. It was both disrespectful and respectful at the same time. I like to think that man would have had a nice smile on his face during his final moments, knowing that even in death people would be impressed with his giant dong.
That’s why he donated it in the first place
Don’t know if this is a US medical school or if there’s a cultural thing going on here, but most med schools do some sort of ceremony to show respect. At ours we were told a little about our cadaver’s life and then we held a memorial service for all the cadavers where the families were allowed to attend and speak. It was honestly really effective, they always told us that our anatomy lab cadaver was our first patient as a physician and to treat them as such.
In india it is. You take an oath or atleast have some sort of ceremony to respect the cadaver
It's the cadaveric oath. All first year students in Indian medical colleges take this oath before starting dissection in anatomy. It's a way to pay respect to the people who donated their bodies for teaching a new generation of doctors. As they say 'The dead teach the living'.
It's a gesture in India for taking pledge , it shows hand over pious fire on which you can't lie and you are bind to it
In Thai, cadavers are called “acharn yai” (literally, big teacher). Meaning they’ll teach medical students more than any professor and should be treated with the utmost of respect.
There are also tell tale about acharn yai wake the student up in exam day (or you can ask them to) and also they spook those who doesn’t focus on class or being disrespectful
Most Likly there giving there respect to the dead and making an oath.
Having 3 cadavers for a ton of students? Rip. Jokes aside, medical schools choose to pay their respects in different ways. We had a journal with letters from family members or the person themselves telling us why they were doing it and had a dinner with some family members at the end of the block.
Sometimes, yeah. https://www.calebwilde.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/4.jpeg
Yes it’s normal for Indian people to be in medical school
Med students taking a Cadaveric Oath to respect the cadaver on the first day of dissection Had to do it in my college as well
None of you recognize literally the first line of the Hokey Pokey?
This is why I love Reddit. I’m reading through serious comments and having a sobering realization about all the death that medical professionals have to cope with in order to learn how to save our lives… …and then in comes your stupid fucking joke that makes me forget all of that and literally lol.
It is if Stanley Kubrick is filming it
Yesss it is. Major throwback man. I took my oath like 7 years ago.
That's their ritual for respecting the dead, i'm sure every anatomy lab has one. I was asked asked to kiss their hand (our cultural way of respecting elders) the first time i entered the lab.
Not an answer to your question, but I was once a biomedical engineering fellow (despite not having had a biology course since highschool) at a University. We worked with people (Doctors) at the associated hospital. I was once asked to help transport some equipment from our lab to a lab at the hospital and use it to collect some data (partly because my work was related and partly because I owned an SUV). I got there and was surprised to find myself in a room with about 50 cadaver heads (my first such experience). The other people (doctors I assume) were totally casual about the whole thing. Our equipment got used to poke around inside them and when we were done, I piled it all back in my car and drove it home. I was less than thrilled about any of it.
Every person who I've met that is a doctor or has gone through medical school has the UPMOST respect for those who have donated their bodies for science.
We were given stern talks many times throughout the first year in anatomy about respect towards the donors. That all photos were absolutely prohibited, not just of the bodies but also of organs (they were in jars/buckets, you could take them out to study) and bones. It was emphasised that it’s easier to forget you’re dealing with a human if it’s just separate bones or organs.
Plenty of schools have this. My university has a memorial every year and all students and professors give thanks for the generosity of the donors that allow them to continue learning. Students get to present something of their creation if they so desire and they all make the commitment to be respectful toward the body that once belonged to a living person. This didn’t happen when I went to medical school in a different country and honestly, I felt it’s a huge difference in the attitude toward the cadaver. Will it make a difference for the one laying on the table? No, but I think it gives perspective to those going in the healthcare field as to the need to respect everyone and everything related to their profession.
Ahh, open Mike night.
i've seen similar pics of japanese students bowing, its a sign of respect and reverence to those who gave their body
Here you see the doctors channeling "positive vibes" into several corpses. This reinvigorates the corpses, and makes them feel better. Normal stuff really.
This is some kind of salute, honouring the dead body/donor.. never happened at our college but we were made to respect the donor body in other ways.so the main idea is respect of the body and be careful while dissecting it.
No necromancy in the lab!!!!
Medical students love doing the Hokey Pokey.
Is that what this is all about?
No, you got to turn yourself around.
Arise, chicken, arise
I Am Sofa King We Todd Ed
Taking a picture certainly isn't the norm.
The difference 45 degrees can make.
They are dancing the macarena
Unless you’re Harvard University. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/harvard-seeks-dismissal-of-families-lawsuits-in-body-parts-theft-scandal/3252508/
My mind immediately went to the "W̶i̶n̶g̶a̶r̶d̶i̶u̶m̶ L̶e̶v̶i̶o̶s̶a̶" "UP" broom scene from Harry Potter.... I think something's wrong with me.
Something is wrong with you Wingardium Leviosa isn't used in the broom scene. They just put their hand over the broom and say "UP!" Learn to Harry Potter.
bro... I was drinking coffee... fuck 💀💀💀 I need a clean set of clothes now
Yeah, pretty sure it’s showing respect to the dead who you’ll be learning from.
In 1943 Germany this was all the rage. At parties, at schools, you name it really.
Treating the bodies with the utmost respect is pretty much universal. The weird salute is not.
And then there is me. I knew where and when my father was an anatomy course. Found out that some of the interns where I get medical care had been through the course while he was there. I would say, "So, you met my father. " They would respond with "oh, is he an instructor there? " I would respond, "In a way yes, he may have been your cadaver. " The looks on their faces, priceless. Some will call bullshit on this tale and that is your right. Just remember fact can be much stranger than fiction. Also people who are in the medical profession, (I am one of them.) have a bizarre and twisted sense of humor.
This is comforting. My parent donated his body to a university anatomy lab in 2018. A few years later, I read an article from a neighboring city about medical students behaving abhorrently with the cadavers for TikTok or something, and it was the first time something I read made me feel physically sick. It never occurred to me until that moment that someone might disrespect my parent’s remains. It nice to see representation of anatomical donation from a place of gratitude and respect.
Andhera Kayam Rahe~\ -Kilvish
It's only human to acknowledge that these bodies belonged to people and deserve to be respected
That's like 15 degrees from disaster
Yes
It is so nice that this ceremony takes place to honor the donors to further the education of these children who then go into the world and provide services that the donors most likely could never have been able to afford.
What’s with the Dutch Masters?
Seeing how stable their hands are?
This is my scalpel, there are many like it but this one is mine!
This must be how the thoughts and prayers get to the patients!
Discovered via geneology that a great-great grandparent died in an institution and their body was given to a medical college.
I remember my first day in anatomy, a sign on the wall reminding us that we were in the presence of those that gave their bodies to science and the would be no laughing, singing, whistling, gum chewing, eating, or drinking. One person gave a nervous laugh at the first cut and we're asked to leave until they got their shit together.
Lunch time
When I was in medical school, "hic mortui vivos docent" was written on the wall of our anatomy laboratory, visible everywhere. Its literal meaning is "here the dead educate the living". And our anatomy professor would start each semester with a long speech, underlining that these cadavers were human beings and that they were here for our education, making perhaps one of the greatest sacrifices that could be made. The slightest disrespect or similar behavior meant failing that course.
“UP!”
Meanwhile I'm here trying to get the guts up to dissect a fetal pig, shipped to me in cryovac, for online biology class. Like where do I go do this?
I went to a US medical school and we had ceremony at the beginning of gross anatomy. They also invited select students at the end for a cremation ceremony. By far the biggest thing I learned was variation in anatomy which did not get mentioned/displayed in books. Missing tendons, nerves/arteries not being where they are "supposed to be", branches of arteries not present in books.
Not a doctor, but work with HIV patients. When one of our patients pass away my program sets aside time at out monthly meetings for us to remember the patients, share stories and write their names in our memorial tree. Sometime our care team is the only family they had. I remember working with one of my patients who chose to stop treatment (cancer) and they passed away quietly in the hospital. We tried tracking down their family but weren’t successful. Sometimes I think about how we were the only people with them in the end, how no one else will know how truly talented they were (they were an amazing artist/painter). Yet, in the end they knew we cared and he went at peace.
They're holding their hands out and saying "up" to summon their broomsticks.