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Bird's EyeView
Monday, November 18, 1996
Gross anatomy
Story by Bradley Brooks and Melody Ard • Photos by Chris Hamilton
The basement in Haworth Hall houses cadavers for use by the Human Anatomy Dissection class. Besides trying to de-humanize the bodies, the stench is overwhelming.
Six dried-up cadavers and an intense odor greet students as they walk through an incomspicuous door in the basement of Haworth Hall.
Once inside that door, 24 KU students in white medical jackets, with stains from God-knows-what, work on cadavers that are housed in six stainless steel tanks. Dissection tools lay on a table. An anatomical waste disposal can sit in the corner. This is not your typical class.
"The first day we went right into the legs," said Guy Lambeck, Overland Park junior. "It was all so new. It's kind of a trip to cut into a dead human."
This trip that Lambeck and his classmates are on is the Human Anatomy Dissection Lab class. In the course, the students dissect, explore and become intimately aware of the insides of cadavers, which are provided by the Willed Bodies Program at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
"The most important purpose of the program is training health professionals to provide health needs to the
state of Kansas in the future," said Charles Thomas, director of the program and assistant professor of anatomy at the Med Center. "It is an intensive experience — both academically and emotionally."
Thomas said that the opportunity to work on a human body was an important one for students.
"This is not a right; it is definitely a privilege," he said. The lab is taught by graduate teaching assistant Paul Hopkinson, who has instructed the class at the University for five years.
"The most important thing is the impression of how complex the body is," Hopkinson said. "It still blows me away after five years to see everything inside."
After so many dissections on cadavers at the University, Hopkinson knows the human body well.
But, he said that each cadaver was unique and presented new challenges.
"I've found that after five years, no matter how well you know it, each body is different," he said. "No matter how well you know it, you are surprised at some
point. Each body should come with a road map or a guide."
For anatomy books serve as a general road map for the class, the students really grasp the subject through hands-on work with Hopkinson as a guide.
To the surprise of most students, the semester-long tour of the human body begins on the first day of class. On that day, they start the dissection procedures.
The tanks with cadavers, dissection tools and model skeletons are all things that students notice on the first day. What strikes most students first, however, is not the classroom's visual surroundings.
Adrien Lewis, Springfield, Mass., senior, said that he had an immediate reaction upon entering the room.
"Damn it stinks." he said.
It is the powerful smell of the preserving chemical phenol, along with formaldehyde and alcohol, that initially overwhelms a visitor. It is an odor that permeates the hair, hands and clothes of the students in the course.
Marci Stidham, who has received a degree from the University and helps teach the class, said that there were some techniques for dealing with the invading odor.
Kirsten Leibham, Overland Park senior, washes her hands to remove the odor of chemicals that preserve the cadavers. The smell also penetrates clothing and hair.
"Some people wash their hands with toothpaste, and some people put Vicks Vaporub under their nose so that it doesn't smell so bad," she said.
Once students get used to the odor, they face another hurdle — de-humizing the cadavers.
"The hardest part was doing the face. It was kind of erie-ish," said Kirsten Leibham, Overland Park senior. "It wasn't such a person while working on the legs."
Nevertheless, the students taking the course understand its importance.
"We're pretty serious because we respect the cadavers," Lambeck said. "People donated their body, so we're respectful."
Lewis agreed. He said that the course was becoming one of his favorites.
For him, the cadavers, though somewhat repulsive, provide the best means of learning about the human body.
"I learn more in this class than any other I have," Lewis said. "I love it."
The skull from a cadaver is used by anatomy students as a teaching technique.
Paul Hopkinson, Lawrence graduate teaching assistant,
and Marci Stidham, Lawrence teaching assistant, prepare
a quiz about bones for the Human Anatomy class.
The Human Anatomy class studies cadavers that are housed in metal cases. The laboratory is located in Haworth Hall.
Interview with the Panther In the past Bobby Seale questioned authority; now he himself is being questioned ... by the Kansan's Eric Weslander
Bobby Seale will speak in the Kansas Union Ballroom tomorrow at 8 p.m. Seale was chairman of the Black Panther Party from 1966 to 1974. The event is free.
The Black Panther Party came about through student activism in university communities. You were chairman of the party from 1966 to 1974. Today, you work with Temple University as a community liaison. In what ways have you taken advantage of the university format and what can students do to get the most out of a university as you have?
A: It's one thing to be emotional, but it's another thing to organize an organization like the Black Panther Party. From my input, I was methodological in the way I went about doing things, and the way I went about dealing with the demographics of how to set up free breakfast for children programs, and teaching, and giving political inspiration and teaching demographics of how to do this to Black Panther Party members all across this country — the 5000 members I had put across this country by mid-1969.
Higher education plays a key role in that. I mean, it's beyond myth, it's beyond religious emotional belief, it's beyond pseudo-science when you get down to the nitty-gritty about it.
So, I guess I'm reiterating here about higher education, whether I'm understanding my African and African-American people's history of struggle, or Native-American people's history of struggle, or White-American people's history of struggle, in terms of poor and working-class people. To investigate that, and understand that and realize what it really is,
You have your own homepage on the internet. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
beyond all of the stereotypes, is what the goal objective is about.
A: Well, we're still trying to get that thing really broadened and expanded. I'm trying to expand it so we have a weekly magazine there. I'm trying to expand it so that people can download various pieces of historical information ...
I want this homepage to be more about the present day and where we are going in the future.
In that area, with respect to the weekly magazine publication that will be free to people, this is what I really want to get the homepage doing, besides just people having access to order books or memorabilia.
In what ways do you feel that, over the years, the Black Panther's or your cause has been misrepresented?
A: Of course, historically, the FBI counterintelligence program and other politicians attempted to stereotype us. They called us hoodlums and thugs, but they tell nobody about the fact that I worked 2 1/2 years on the Gemini Missile program in the engineering department, right? That I worked four years for the United States Air Force, structural repairman for high performance aircraft, an architect, a builder, a stand-up comedian, a jazz drummer, a hunter and a fisherman. They didn't say that, you
see what I'm getting at?
What I'm getting at is that I'm really sort of still defending what we we're really about as people; as human beings who were out there trying to stand up for our constitutional democratic civil human rights, as I like to say. And not taking any acrats from that handful of overt racists who were about attacking people. Before I came along, they were about beating up and terrorizing peaceful demonstrators.
And when I would say, "Well, we'll defend ourselves," after seeing all of this happen in our face, they said I believed in violence.
I said, "No, I don't believe in violence; I believe in self-defense for violence that is perpetrated upon us."
It doesn't make any difference whether you're black, white, blue, red, green, yellow or polka dot. All human beings, intelligently, have a right to defend themselves. I'm trying to clarify that. I'm defending what I know as one of the persons who caused that organization to be what it was. I'm trying to get people to understand the real character of the party, beyond the old government and racist-type stereotyping.
What is the most important thing that people can learn from coming to see you speak?
I think they should learn that they must see themselves as creative, revolutionary humanists. That, in all of the things we do, in all the issues and problems, and all the civil human
rights issues, environmental issues, et cetera, to look at yourself and all the higher education that you get as one of those agents who want to help educate people so that we can get to a future world — some kind of decent human relationships between human beings on the face of this little old earth that we stand on. That's the most important thing that I think I'm after. To be able to do this, it is about trying to make sure as much as possible that our ideas, our beliefs and our new realizations correspond correctly to reality.
What do you see the next four years shaping up to be like with the Clinton administration?
A: Clinton will probably make some skewed effort at what I call the progressive side of things. I don't totally discount Clinton, but I still see this major political party as still being largely used by too many of the corporate money-rich and other sideline avaricious people. So, it's a process. It's a human, social, political organizational and behavioral change in process that we're going to go through. This four years is going to have to show a greater amount of progressiveness in terms of trying to establish, as Ralph Nader himself said, some new form of democracy that makes human sense.
Bobby Seale's homepage can be found at:
http://www.bobbyseale.com
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