Anatomy Lab Offers a New Lesson

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

-Sir Francis Bacon

Anatomy Lab is a rite of passage that no physician ever forgets. Human dissection begins in the first days of medical school. Unspoken questions well up. What does a cadaver look like? How will I react? How will I ever remember everything? What if I can’t deal with working on a dead body?

A cadaver feels more like cold, moist, heavy fabric than a person. The color is all wrong and the tissues are firm and unyielding. As the dissection continues, many of the features that we recognize as being “human” are lost, although the contours and the scaffolding remain. Two decades later, I have vivid memories of the intricate anatomy of “our” cadaver.

Each year, several of us spend time helping students perform Head and Neck dissections while demonstrating surgical procedures and clinical illnesses. The questions are earnest and the students stump me regularly. As we all ignore the fact that a dead person lies on a table between us, we discuss everything from cancer to cosmetic surgery. Over the years, I completely disconnected the cadaver from the person.

That attitude changed when one of my cancer patients announced that he had donated his body to science. He hoped he would “end up in a cadaver lab teaching medical students.” I congratulated him, and hoped, silently, that he would not. I wondered at his gift. He died a few weeks later.

When classes began, I approached the lab with dread. How would his presence change my ability to teach in this most unnatural of environments? I made the rounds through all of the dissection stations, stopping at each but always looking to see who was on the next table. It was eerie and a bit unnerving.

He was not one of the cadavers and I suspect his surgical defects made him unsuitable for a place on one of the tables. Nevertheless, I have approached the Anatomy Lab with a different attitude ever since.

Bruce H. Campbell, MD, FACS
Professor of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences
Chief, Division of Head and Neck Oncology
Interim Director, The Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center