Impressions On Our First Cadaver Dissection

This past week was the first time for many of us to get hands on experience in human anatomy by beginning our first human dissection. For our program this year, four considerate people had decided to donate their bodies to us, and with 16 people in our class, that means there are four students per cadaver.

When many people think about a morgue or an autopsy examination room, they think of some horror film set or dungeon at the bottom of a stone staircase where an unknown man with a crazed look to his eyes is hunched over a body while dressed in blood stained garbs. The sound of the cutting of flesh and sawing of bone resonates throughout the cold corridors which are dimly lit by torches affixed to the walls. This kind of scene makes for great atmosphere in movies, but the reality is much less terrifying and more sanitary than what is portrayed in Hollywood films.

The room where we are in is quite large and has enough tables to hold perhaps a dozen or more bodies. It is well lit and the white walls somehow remind me of being inside of a hospital. It's not underground, but rather up on the fourth floor.

Although I had seen human cadavers before, I had never actually cut human flesh, let alone the flesh of a person who had already passed away. I could tell that even though we were all calm filing into the examination room and eager to begin, many of us, myself included, were hesitant to make that first cut. More than that, some of us were hesitant to even physically touch the corpses. It's one thing to handle a chicken to be put into the oven, but handling a deceased person is on a whole different level.

Nevertheless, without wanting to show our trepidation to our classmates, we quickly dove in. So much so that muscles were on more than one occasion cut entirely through and remained attached to the subcutaneous tissues. Surprisingly, within the first couple of minutes, all of us were cutting as comfortably as if we were carpenters working with wood.

(The speed at which we became accustomed to cutting human flesh was of some concern to me actually. If we became used to cutting flesh so quickly, an activity that in and of itself is mutilating to the human body, does that mean that human empathy for other human beings can really be overcome so easily? History books and the news provide us with many examples of horrific acts committed on people by people who seem to have lost their empathy for others. Soldiers committing torture at Abu Ghraib, hospitals that dump their destitute patients on the streets, even the person who pushes the button to inject a condemned criminal with a lethal concoction, all are people who must have struggled with or lost their empathy for others. I don't believe that cutting human flesh will make one more likely to murder someone anymore than a child who plays video games is to shoot up their classmates. But, at the same time, I can't help but think that if I were born in an era when violence and death in the media were less prevalent, I would have showed more apprehension in dissecting the deceased.)

There were a great many things that I noticed during our first dissection.

-The atmosphere of the four of us working together to cut away and expose muscles was actually quite fun (and of course educational). It was the first time for many of us to cut so there was a kind of euphoria of having discovered a completely different world, and we were able to share it all with our peers. It's like looking into a telescope and seeing Saturn for the first time.
-There's a saying I learned in Japan that goes like, "Ten people, ten colors", and just like people, cadavers are all different. (They were once people after all.) Some have a lot of subcutaneous adipose tissue to cut through, some have really dark muscles, some give off a pungent embalming fluid smell, some don't smell at all, etc...
-Scalpels are incredibly sharp. We all managed to make it without cutting ourselves, but I never realized how well scalpels can really cut.
-There were a few 'Aha!' moments of eureka that I only would have discovered by dissecting. Things that are difficult to comprehend from a book. For example, I could clearly see how far the trapezius extended down the spine, whereas before I had always imagined that the trapezius extended all the way down to the sacrum.
-Muscles are a lot more thin than I thought. Perhaps if we were dissecting bodybuilders the muscles would be thicker, but many of the muscles that we've reflected, such as the external, internal and transverse obliques are more like sheets of paper.
-Dissecting is quite a physical activity. Cleaning muscles and exposing fascia requires a lot of arm work. You also need nimble fingers for manipulating small instruments or separating tissues apart through blunt dissection.
-Dissecting, to the degree that we are, also takes quite a bit of time. Like in any profession where one has to be on their feet for a long time, your back can begin to hurt. We spent perhaps 3.5 hours dissecting and it's going to take many many more hours to explore everything.
-When you're working in close contact with the cadavers, you're bound to brush your skin or clothes up against the cadaver. In my case, when we decided to turn the cadaver over, I needed to reach under the cadaver and pull from underneath it. I was promptly rewarded with a river of embalming fluid running into my glove. Over time, I expect to just get used to these things.
-Working close to the cadaver also means that your clothes are going to be permeated with the smell. I didn't realize it until I got home to take a shower that my clothes smelt like embalming fluid.
-The cadavers that we received were treated with a kind of embalming fluid that made them feel less 'real'. I don't believe that cutting into these cadavers is quite the same feeling as cutting into a person who had just recently died hours earlier. Somehow, these cadavers didn't evoke any kind of terror or horror in me, but they did evoke a feeling of sympathy from me. It was as if these cadavers were tiny or helpless. They evoked a sense of pity in me in that these were once people and now this poor body is all that's left.
-People have often said that they get hungry when doing an autopsy or grossing. Whether it's the presence of meat, the long hours, the physical exertion or a combination of all three remains a mystery.

I don't know the four people who donated their bodies to us, nor their lives, nor their experiences in life. It's only after they've passed on do I get to meet them. It's a very strange relationship, but I am grateful that they have donated their bodies to us so that we may study anatomy. Through us, these people will have achieved their goal, that is to enrich the lives of those still living.