I'm sure I have mentioned that we work with cadavers in anatomy - if not, yeah, we work with cadavers. We walked into gross anatomy on the first day of lab, and were assigned to a table that held our cadaver for the class. I say "our" because we do not rotate around the room, or swap tables - our table is our table for the duration of the course.

I remember back to the first cadaver I ever worked on - at DU, our anatomy class had one cadaver that was shared by 45 students, and disected by several undergrad TAs that succeeded in making our cadaver resemble a skeleton covered in beef jerky. I was never disturbed by the site of the cadaver - bless her heart, she had been about 85 years old, and was so tiny - she resembled the patients I cared for back home... it was as if she had just had a bath, and was taking a nap. Even still, my Westernized views of the universe still kept me from thinking of her as a "person". Descartes state that the soul is the person, and the body was simply transportation; a possession that the soul travels around in. She was a vehicle... like a broken down car with no driver. We observe the radiator, the muffler, and engine, but know that the vehicle won't move no matter what repairs we try and make. It has been the same here.

I must say, I was impressed with the fact that none of my classmates has had any sort of reaction to the cadavers - no one has passed out, no one has made the cadaver wave "hi" to a classmate, yadda yadda. People have been fairly respectful, which is a good thing. Our school actually has a willed body program where individuals choose to willingly give their only true possession, their physical body, to this school. I think this helps contribute to the voluntary respect the students show. Up to this point, I have done everything I can to be as respectful to our cadaver as possible... however, today things got a little more messy....

For our gross anatomy class, we are able to receive 3% extra credit by completing a pathology report on our cadaver. We have a large packet of observations and notes to make on our cadaver. This means that we have to note every single thing we notice about our cadaver (luckily, we have some nice pathologists who come into the lab to discuss our findings with us, and point out things we might have missed.) This isn't too bad when we have to look at kidneys, or the liver, or what-have-you, but we have to check out the teeth and make observations, open up organs to check for abnormalities, and disarticulate the shoulder, hip and a knee to note the apperance of the joints. Gathered around the table, we attempted to open his mouth to observe his teeth - his jaw would not budge. Luckily, we were able to see that he had a full set of dentures just by moving his lips. That wasn't too bad. Next, we started on all the organ observations, and wound up opening just about everything to check for carcinomas, ulcers and polyps, only to find everything was grossly normal. The only thing left that we could do today was to disarticulate some joints. The other group of students that shares our table had already dealt with the knee as it was part of the disecting instructions for that day. We couldn't do the hip, as it would destroy all the muscle groups we are currently studying. That left the shoulder... after cutting through the deltoids, rotator cuff muscles, various tendons, the brachial plexus of nerves and the brachial artery, and after huffing and puffing and twisting, I pulled our cadavers arm off.

I have mixed feelings about this action - it's just a body, and one that was given to the school for us to observe and document. In this light, it's a discarded machine - one for us to dismantle and learn about its hidden inner workings.  On the other hand, Jon brought up a good point - he doesn't see them as bodies, he continually states "it must be weird to be in a room with all those dead *people*." From this point of view, these are still people, even if they do not get up and move about on their own accord, or speak to us to tell us exactly how they move and function. Did I dismantle a fender, or do something else? I'll contemplate this more later.....