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Students dissect bodies and emotions in biology class
By Clay McCuistion
ebecca Cartar remembers the first time she cut into a dead body.
"I was really cautious," said Cartart, Lawrence senior. "I was just trying to be very careful. It was almost more like a surgery, like you're trying to deal with a live human."
She soon noticed, though, that the texture of the corpse's skin was unusual.
"It's so rubbery and well preserved, almost like a rubber Halloween mask," she said. "You can almost put yourself away from thinking of it as a human."
Cartart isn't a grave robber, mortician or mad scientist. Instead, she's one of more than 60 University of Kansas undergraduates enrolled in Biology 302 — an anatomy lab devoted to dissecting six human cadavers. Another 60-some students take Biology 301 — an observation class that also learns from examining the corpses. There are six sections altogether devoted to study of the bodies.
Chris Sheil, Lawrence graduate student, is one of five instructors who oversee the courses. He said the course was special because students were allowed to dissect the bodies themselves and the University received a half-dozen fresh bodies each semester from the KU Medical Center.
"It's really unusual," Sheil said.
Many universities only use one cadaver a year or re-use cleanly dissected bodies, he said. Here, students benefit from hands-on experience with different body types. The focus in both the observation and dissection sections is on identification of muscles, tendons, nerves and other soft tissue structures.
"It's really intense, actually, as far as the kind of material that's required," Shell said.
In general, pre-nursing, pre-physical therapy and occupational therapy majors enroll in the class. Pre-med students take more intensive anatomy classes later on in their schoolwork.
An evening in the lab
Students bustled around in white lab coats and latex
Wednesday night, about 35 students gathered in the lab on the first floor of Haworth Hall to work on the cadavers. The long, narrow room was brightly lighted, the air suffused with the sweetly bitter smell of preservative.
"It's so rubbery and well preserved, almost like a rubber Halloween mask. You can almost put yourself away from thinking of it as a
human."
Rebecca Carttar
stand in white lab coats and latex gloves. They poked and prodded the six bodies, which lay head to toe on individual metal tanks. The heads and groin areas of the cadavers were covered with brightly patterned bath towels, leaving the already dissected legs and arms open for examination.
The students were reviewing for an exam.
Shell worked intently with the group, bending over cadaver No. 4 (a former 74-year-old photo developer)
(up) accordingly to nide tacked up on one side of the room) and carefully wielding a pair of forceps.
"We cleared out the superscapular artery vein and nerve," he told the class. "Everybody make sure to get a look at that."
Students looked up from their cadavers in interest. They held sheets of paper covered with the names of the upper extremity soft structures they would be required to know for the test this week.
Shell said he made sure to treat the corpses with respect. "We're pretty much stewards of the bodies while we're here," Shell said.
Students are apprehensive at first,but tend to adjust.
"I've never had problems," Shell said. "I've been doing this eight semesters, and I've never had problems with people getting sick."
The work of dissection — cutting off the skin, clearing away the fat — can be intensive, though. Students aren't always mentally prepared to start cutting and slicing at a dead human body.
"In the beginning of the semester, it takes a lot of time to get them to do what they're expected to do," Sheil said.
"There are these sorts of issues that you don't have with a cat."
Shell teaches his dissection lab from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday. At the beginning of the semester, students are uneasy about going to lunch directly afterward, he said. The squeamishminess fades, though.
"By the middle or end of the semester, all people can talk about is how hungry they are," Shell said.
Getting underneath the skin
"We have a kind of ambiguity toward the corpse," he said. "When you see a corpse, you still identify it as the person the corpse was."
Don Marquis, professor of philosophy, said that the usual frightened reaction to a dead body was natural.
Marquis took a human anatomy course as an undergraduate and said that students had to distance themselves from thinking of cadavers as human. The only way to get work done is thinking of the corpse as another lab specimen.
Students adjust quickly because the preserved body is so different from a conscious, breathing person. Especially when the skin is removed and the muscles and bones become visible, the body becomes less human.
"I think there is a peculiar psychology going on." Mar-
The rest of the laboratory chattered and bustled.
The cadaver was still.