Adventures in Med School; Cadaver Edition
May 20, 2013 10:57 AM Subscribe
I have read this thread.
I have two questions:
1. Are there any cultures or traditions that forbid donating one's body to a medical school after death?
2. Where, besides the lovely tribute posted in the link, can I find first-hand accounts of med school students' experiences with donated bodies and cadavers?
Judaism has traditionally forbidden organ donation after death (though most denominations now accept it), and more conservative denominations forbid body donations. (Others say that as it counts as saving a life, it outweighs other considerations, but the "donating your body for research = saving a life" part is contested. There are also debates about whether it acceptable in a location that cremates all donated bodies.)
posted by jeather at 11:09 AM on May 20, 2013
posted by jeather at 11:09 AM on May 20, 2013
The following information is focused on donation after death. Living donation has slightly different concerns for some groups.
Shinto does not permit organ donation for two reasons. First, the human body is impure after death, and also defiling a dead body is very bad luck for the person who does it.
The Romani do not donate because they believe that the soul spends one year retracing the steps of the body, and the body must be complete at burial for this journey to be successful. Damaging the corpse makes this impossible and leads to bad things.
A lot of people are surprised to hear that Jehovah’s Witnesses can be organ donors and recipients. This is true if the organs and tissues are drained of any and all blood. They very very strongly adhere to the biblical proscription against consuming blood.
Judaism in generally is currently very pro donation, because the mitzvah of saving a life excuses you from nearly any other obligation of the covenant (my favorite example is that if your choices on Shabbat are freeze to death or light a fire, G-d wants you to go collect some kindling and strike a match). Saving a life is considered by many to be pretty much the greatest thing a human can do. For some people the big argument against donation is that it causes a delay in burial. As it stands, organs must be retrieved very quickly to maintain viability, and most Rabbis feel the delay is permissible when saving lives.
Islam also generally agrees that saving a life permits the prohibited. (There was a fatwa in the mid 1990s that is often pointed to which expressly endorses donation as a very personal choice, but selling organs is not permitted. I'm sure you can probably find it, but if you want me to hunt it down, I can).
Seconding the book suggestion of Stiff. Mary Roach does approach the topic with a lot of levity, which is something that I have heard some med students do as well, in the privacy of the lab. It's a heavy topic. Don't count on finding many people willing to go public with the humor of their cadaver, because the respect for the person making that gift (of their own body) is profound.
posted by bilabial at 11:24 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
Shinto does not permit organ donation for two reasons. First, the human body is impure after death, and also defiling a dead body is very bad luck for the person who does it.
The Romani do not donate because they believe that the soul spends one year retracing the steps of the body, and the body must be complete at burial for this journey to be successful. Damaging the corpse makes this impossible and leads to bad things.
A lot of people are surprised to hear that Jehovah’s Witnesses can be organ donors and recipients. This is true if the organs and tissues are drained of any and all blood. They very very strongly adhere to the biblical proscription against consuming blood.
Judaism in generally is currently very pro donation, because the mitzvah of saving a life excuses you from nearly any other obligation of the covenant (my favorite example is that if your choices on Shabbat are freeze to death or light a fire, G-d wants you to go collect some kindling and strike a match). Saving a life is considered by many to be pretty much the greatest thing a human can do. For some people the big argument against donation is that it causes a delay in burial. As it stands, organs must be retrieved very quickly to maintain viability, and most Rabbis feel the delay is permissible when saving lives.
Islam also generally agrees that saving a life permits the prohibited. (There was a fatwa in the mid 1990s that is often pointed to which expressly endorses donation as a very personal choice, but selling organs is not permitted. I'm sure you can probably find it, but if you want me to hunt it down, I can).
Seconding the book suggestion of Stiff. Mary Roach does approach the topic with a lot of levity, which is something that I have heard some med students do as well, in the privacy of the lab. It's a heavy topic. Don't count on finding many people willing to go public with the humor of their cadaver, because the respect for the person making that gift (of their own body) is profound.
posted by bilabial at 11:24 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]
Are there any cultures or traditions that forbid donating one's body to a medical school after death?
This is a rather complicated question, and it varies in Christianity, with whether or not a particular sect or denomination believes in bodily resurrection.
posted by dortmunder at 11:27 AM on May 20, 2013
This is a rather complicated question, and it varies in Christianity, with whether or not a particular sect or denomination believes in bodily resurrection.
posted by dortmunder at 11:27 AM on May 20, 2013
You might like this excellent book: First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab.
posted by Corvid at 12:51 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by Corvid at 12:51 PM on May 20, 2013
I'm about five years out from my cadaver lab experience, now finishing my first year of internal medicine residency.
We had a class meeting/lecture before our first lab session. We toured the lab, met our lab partners, and the professor gave a talk reinforcing the need to treat our cadavers with absolute respect.
Many of my best friends in medical school were in my anatomy group, and the one just north of ours - we had a female body, and they had a male, so there was lots of go-between between the two groups. Cadaver lab in medical school is the first experience in that setting that required teamwork and real communication. One absolutely cannot be allowed to cut unless they know what they're cutting.
We met our cadaver on the first day. Some of the groups knew their cadavers' first names... we didn't, but opted to give her a name. This was a conscious decision on our parts, because we felt like it was a way to remember that she was a person, and not just a body that we were taking apart - in many ways, the cadaver is the first patient. Our lady was in her 70s, but her body was in such disrepair that we thought initially thought she was much, much older.
To see so much disease in a person is incredibly overwhelming, and even more so when you don't actually know anything about medicine. Lots of people had cadavers that showed evidence of heart attacks. Some people found tumors. Our lady was missing several toes (probably diabetic), had the worst scoliosis I've ever seen (even years later), and a hiatal hernia that was so big that it had pushed her heart to the midline of her body. Over the course of our time with her, we found lots of little findings, as well. It was plainly obvious that she was very ill at the end of her life.
We had our bodies for about four months. Lots of students get sick for the first few labs, but during our term, people kept getting sick. They tested the bodies and found out that they had been prepared improperly, and they also found out that the state-of-the-art ventilation system was broken... so we were breathing in loads of formaldehyde. It complicated a lot of the course for the rest of the year - they took our bodies away and we had to share bodies with the podiatry students.
At the end of the year, we had a tribute and memorial for our body donors. I think most of my class turned out. People gave little speeches thanking our donors and their families, and a classmate who was a gifted pianist played "Clair de Lune." It was a really beautiful ceremony - most of us left with wet faces.
The lab influences affects everyone differently. There are people who just want to get through the experience. There are people that find that they enjoy the form of the human body so much, and enjoy the process of dissection that they'll come in after hours to review their work - lots of those folks end up in pathology, radiology, or surgical fields. For me, given the state of our lady made me think long and hard about how she came to be in such a state, as well as how it could have been prevented. I had been thinking about a career in primary care, and for a long time, that was one of the primary influences in my specialty selection.
posted by honeybee413 at 2:56 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]
We had a class meeting/lecture before our first lab session. We toured the lab, met our lab partners, and the professor gave a talk reinforcing the need to treat our cadavers with absolute respect.
Many of my best friends in medical school were in my anatomy group, and the one just north of ours - we had a female body, and they had a male, so there was lots of go-between between the two groups. Cadaver lab in medical school is the first experience in that setting that required teamwork and real communication. One absolutely cannot be allowed to cut unless they know what they're cutting.
We met our cadaver on the first day. Some of the groups knew their cadavers' first names... we didn't, but opted to give her a name. This was a conscious decision on our parts, because we felt like it was a way to remember that she was a person, and not just a body that we were taking apart - in many ways, the cadaver is the first patient. Our lady was in her 70s, but her body was in such disrepair that we thought initially thought she was much, much older.
To see so much disease in a person is incredibly overwhelming, and even more so when you don't actually know anything about medicine. Lots of people had cadavers that showed evidence of heart attacks. Some people found tumors. Our lady was missing several toes (probably diabetic), had the worst scoliosis I've ever seen (even years later), and a hiatal hernia that was so big that it had pushed her heart to the midline of her body. Over the course of our time with her, we found lots of little findings, as well. It was plainly obvious that she was very ill at the end of her life.
We had our bodies for about four months. Lots of students get sick for the first few labs, but during our term, people kept getting sick. They tested the bodies and found out that they had been prepared improperly, and they also found out that the state-of-the-art ventilation system was broken... so we were breathing in loads of formaldehyde. It complicated a lot of the course for the rest of the year - they took our bodies away and we had to share bodies with the podiatry students.
At the end of the year, we had a tribute and memorial for our body donors. I think most of my class turned out. People gave little speeches thanking our donors and their families, and a classmate who was a gifted pianist played "Clair de Lune." It was a really beautiful ceremony - most of us left with wet faces.
The lab influences affects everyone differently. There are people who just want to get through the experience. There are people that find that they enjoy the form of the human body so much, and enjoy the process of dissection that they'll come in after hours to review their work - lots of those folks end up in pathology, radiology, or surgical fields. For me, given the state of our lady made me think long and hard about how she came to be in such a state, as well as how it could have been prevented. I had been thinking about a career in primary care, and for a long time, that was one of the primary influences in my specialty selection.
posted by honeybee413 at 2:56 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]
It's been a while, but one of the practical details that I recall is that (at least at my school) you started dissecting the back first. Partially it's because the back is thick-skinned and forgiving of newbies with scalpels, and you're unlikely to really hack up anything small and delicate you were supposed to reveal.
The other reason is that so you get comfortable with the idea of dissecting a human cadaver by the time you have to turn the body over and see their face, much less follow the instruction to remove their eye to examine the extraocular muscles. It just gives you a bit of pause when that moment comes, since you're looking at a person's face. But then there's the additional uncanny part about how their features are clearly distorted by death and embalming. Modern first-world people don't always have the same familiarity with death that some others do, and I had classmates who had never even been to an open-casket funeral. This moment was their first exposure to a dead person!
If you're really interested in that sort of interaction, pathologists (and pathology residents) will have the most interesting personal stories, as they see the deceased at their most and least dignified.
posted by vetala at 6:20 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
The other reason is that so you get comfortable with the idea of dissecting a human cadaver by the time you have to turn the body over and see their face, much less follow the instruction to remove their eye to examine the extraocular muscles. It just gives you a bit of pause when that moment comes, since you're looking at a person's face. But then there's the additional uncanny part about how their features are clearly distorted by death and embalming. Modern first-world people don't always have the same familiarity with death that some others do, and I had classmates who had never even been to an open-casket funeral. This moment was their first exposure to a dead person!
If you're really interested in that sort of interaction, pathologists (and pathology residents) will have the most interesting personal stories, as they see the deceased at their most and least dignified.
posted by vetala at 6:20 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jessamyn at 11:04 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]