Returning favours

As medical students, you'd have countless encounters with cadavers in learning anatomy. be it handling prosections, wax specimens, or if you're lucky like us medics in Nottingham, you get to dissect the cadaver with your own bare hands. Ok slash that. Your own gloved hands. ;)

Your experiences would range from cleaning out the fat lobules on various fatty parts of the anatomy, or delicately demonstrate the various muscles, nerves and blood vessels, to scarping out substances from various orifices. All this done baring in mind that it must all be done professionally, in the name of education. It was weird and unsettling at first but as we get into the routine, it was pretty awesome actually; to be able to see touch and explore the organs Nature has cleverly created in all its glory.

You came out each week from the dissection room, with heads held up or low (depending on how the weekly spotter assessment went), not to mention, without failing, smelling like formaldehyde, a wee bit more knowledgeable, and most importantly; grandly more confident in using the scalpel, saws and drills to hopefully help you during the early years of practice later on.


For us in Nottingham this coming week would be the last week of dissection. Like completing a puzzle, organs will be put back into the bodies, dissection tables scrubbed clean and our white coats that we've donned for the last 12 months be passed down to the juniors. As a sign of respect, next week too, we would attend the funerals and say our thank yous personally to the family members of the kind hearted, once-alive bodies that have allowed us to learn many new, exciting things.

After this, we owe them the cadavers one; to be good anatomists and doctors, keep that in mind :)

InsyaAllah