leaving your body to science?

Just a month ago when my anatomy class ended, I took a brief note about some of the incidents I remembered.  I found it today and saw things in a slightly different light - some of our insensitive comments made me wince - but it was a very fresh and honest account so I thought I might as well share it in case some people who stumble upon this blog are wondering how their bodies are going to be treated if they leave it to science, or more specifically, medical students.  (But the below only describes a part of what we did; I'll probably skip some of the process and there were parts of the body I hardly got involved in in the first place.)



1. Meeting the corpse

I just started studying medicine two weeks ago.  It's been a few days since I started peeling human skin.  The first thing I noticed when we saw him come out of the refrigerator was that he was an old man.  He was wrapped up in a plastic bag but I could sort of tell from the silhouette.  He was stiff and heavy.  His legs lay apart around his knee and he had eight toes - five on the left, three on the right.  I couldn't look at his face at first; it was more shocking than I had expected to touch a dead man.  We will probably never know why or when he died.  His cranium was cut open and sewn, and there was something - most likely the remnant of his brain - coming out.  It got onto my hand when we carried him to our table... I could feel it right through my gloves.  The smell of formalin was pretty strong but there was a slightly fishy, fatty smell that made me feel sick for the first few hours.


2. Shaving and peeling

But as we shaved his body (he had some hair left on his head too!) and went on to peel his skin on the posterior side, I got used to it eventually, and could look at his face too.  His whole body sort of resembled that of my grandpa who died this month 12 years ago.  But when I said it aloud, everyone else said they didn't want to relate the corpse with anyone they knew.  My friend N (outside school) said he couldn't see why we would be able to not give him a name when we were going to work with him almost every day for more than three months, but right now, I can't imagine anyone giving him a name.

After class though, we went to a nearby steakhouse and ate as we talked about the corpse.  The dessert sort of tasted like formalin.

As for the peeling, the area around the neck was especially difficult since the skin was stiff and thick. It's also tiring to peel the arms and hands because they've become stiff in a funny position - you sort of have to twist your body to peel.  Tip: use the back of the knife - skin comes off neatly.

By the way, we kept the skin and sort of dressed the corpse with it every time the class was over.


3. Finding nerve fibers / Dissecting the brain and muscles

So... I haven't written in a while, but we're done with the peeling now.  We're working on the brain and muscles.  We cut the brain into pieces last week.  Cutting the cerebellum felt like cutting cheese - sort of.  We're also doing veins and arteries and nerves too.  Nerves look like collagen fibers and collagen fibers look like nerves so it's really confusing and frustrating.  The femur is probably the least complex part of the body.  The veins are large and you can find a lot of things around the inguinal area.  N asked if I was happy when I found the spermatic cord but I actually was because I had been looking for it for an hour.  I'd never seen a spermatic cord in my life but when I followed the two veins (which I initially thought were arteries leading to the cord) and finally saw it, I knew it was what I was looking for.  It's sort of like a never ending treasure hunting.  You dig with tweezers and you sometimes find nothing after hours...

The guy still hasn't been given a name.  In fact, the more I work with him, the less I feel emotional about him - it seems like he's just a dead body.  Of course it was once someone's body.  It was someone's son, and someone's dad.  But now... it's just an empty capsule.

Since we didn't have enough time, we started dissecting muscles when we weren't quite finished with nerves; but that seemed like a good idea because we could see fibers coming out of muscles and we knew those were nerves and not collagen fibers.  Our grandpa (we (or I) started calling the corpse grandpa around this time) had large beautiful red muscles.

We tried to treat each body part as gently as possible but we sort of ended up grabbing and pulling at the skin and muscles since we were so desperate to get things done in time.  I once had my fingers digging under the gluteus muscle all day; we had to find four muscles beneath it.

Cutting the cerebrum felt like cutting ...mushroom.  Since it's a clump of fibers, it almost sort of tears when you dig the right way.  The famous parts such as the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and brain stem were all so small - unbelievably small if you think about what they are doing in your body.

No one used to touch their instruction papers while touching the corpse but everyone got used to it in the end; no one cared much about the paper getting soaked in "brain juice" at this point.  It's just formalin anyway.


4. Dissecting the organs

I was mainly in charge of the digestive organs - they were packed in the abdominal cavity with barely any space left.  We cut the blood vessels and took them all out.  The intestine was very long; when I cut it open it went on forever.  And the blood vessels at the jejunum/ilium - they were almost like a spider's web; picking the mesentery off was pretty exhausting (it's totally monkey task - you learn so little).  Tip: have someone hold the rest of the group of organs when you're washing off what's inside the intestine; that way you can avoid having everything getting covered in green poop (with little pieces of carrots and corns).

Other members cut the rib and took out the heart and lungs.  Some people got pretty attached to the organs they were in charge of - some enjoyed "bathing" their heart in formalin.


5. Spending Christmas with the corpse

Most people went away for winter vacation but we decided to spend our Christmas with our grandpa.  We dissected the kidneys and the ureters, and started taking off the head (tip: find the dens), while some people "picked" the anus and peeled the skin off the genital.


6. Cutting the spine

We used a saw.  It's like cutting hard wood.  The neck part was pretty easy but the lumbar area was tough - it wouldn't move at all and it took three sweating students (the lab was freezing cold) to take the last bit of spine off.  We cut the ganglion and took out the spinal cord; it was sort of like a miniature of what I'd imagined.


7. Dissecting the rest of the organs / putting things back

The last part of the body I dissected was the genital which made me feel a bit sentimental - for a moment, it reminded me of his children and it sort of made me wonder about his whole life for some reason.

When we were done with our exam, we put things back inside the body.  I felt a bit nostalgic when I put the brain back into his skull, but everyone else was just tired so we did it in a hurry.


8. Saying goodbye

The sky was an amazing blue and the weather was great.  Some of the members of the group came in with an awful hangover.  We put the corpse (wrapped in white cloth) into the coffin and cleaned the lab.

I heard some families didn't come to pick up the corpse even after a week, which I thought was sad, but I guess it's not only people who're loved that die.  Everyone dies in the end.



In short, we might've not been the greatest students.  But we had a great experience and I'm sure every student is grateful of it.  The students around me were never particularly emotional or sentimental about the corpse; it was just a corpse after all, but we definitely learned a lot (I didn't really write about the technical stuff but for example, right before we put the heart back in for the last time, I had a chance to touch it again and stick my finger inside the aorta. I felt a dead end (the aortic valve) right away, but when I stuck my finger from the other side of the valve, my finger went through - which shows that the valve works to prevent backward flow).

My mom used to say she would leave her body to medicine if I ever got into med school.  Now she says she definitely will.  I joked that she would only cause trouble to the students considering all the fat they would have to remove.

Either way, I know the students will not always be respectful of her body; to them, it's going to be just a corpse of an unknown woman.  I know that when I pick her up, I wouldn't be able to recognize her face (NOT because the students will be too cruel but because the dissection of the face is part of the program).  But if she really wants to donate her body, I would accept her will.  Because I also know the students will gain a lot, and maybe one of them would take the time to think about her life and write about the great dissecting experience on his/her blog.