Human anatomy class is a right of passage for medical school students, but the bodies they dissect tend to be an afterthought. Who can know the story behind this person on the lab table before them and the choices that ultimately brought them there? The opportunity to go to med school tuition free? A strong belief in education? A small gesture that they will continue to have value once they’ve shed this mortal coil?
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine is hosting its annual body donor memorial today. It is one of many that are held by medical schools around the country, mainly for the benefit of families so they can say good bye to loved ones. It is also a chance for medical school students to humanize the cadavers they dissect. The Medical College receives more than 400 bodies each year, some by families who see it as the most reasonable alternative to a costly funeral.
But it may be a fading practice. There’s a shortage of cadavers and ironically, the rise in organ donors is partly to blame. A body without organs is useless to a medical school seeking to teach their students human anatomy. The price of processing bodies (it is illegal to sell bodies) is roughly $1,300.
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So medical schools are increasingly shifting to virtual dissection tools with iPads. Others have compromised. Columbia Medical School, for example uses an iPad app developed by a couple of medical school students that helps students interact with a particular part of the party and zoom in to view skin, muscle, tendons or bone. It’s an approach that varies from school to school.
Australia-based Anatomedia developed a virtual cadaver that lets programmers assign tactile qualities and make objects respond to the movement which can be stiffness, and textures like the firmness of muscle or the flabbiness of belly fat. Norman Eizenberg, an associate professor at Monash University, founded the company.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Eizenberg compared the time-consuming process of normal dissection with a digital approach: “You can’t just take a knife and fork and start cutting…You need to make the dissections on the cadaver and clear away fat, clear away fibers—all the tissues that hold us together.” In a regular medical school setting it would take a student several days to accomplish what takes them a few clicks on a computer—each screen on Anatomedia represents a week worth of dissection. “On the screen it would take seconds to go to the next level.”
Programs at universities like Tufts and Stanford have taken a hybrid approach and included digital cadavers as part of the training. But W. Paul Brown, a consulting associate professor at the Stanford School of Medicine’s clinical anatomy division, said digital dissection can’t beat training on actual cadavers.
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“There are some things you can do with a cadaver that you can’t do virtually,” he said. “You can lift up a muscle and look underneath it, or you can follow a blood vessel. You can actually feel things. You can have those sensations and wrap your hands around an organ to help with your mental modeling.”
Ellie Farr, a second-year medical students, who is among a medical students group participating in the body donor memorial day event, said she hoped the shift to digital cadavers would be limited. “A lot of programs across the country are moving to online or digital dissection, For me, I don’t get a comprehensive understanding of the location and variation of the anatomy unless I see it myself.”
Update: This story was updated to include more context on what’s causing the shift to virtual dissection.
Update 2: I misattributed a quote to Norman Eizenberg that I should have attributed to Ellie Farr. I have corrected that error and also added another quote from another source for additional context.