from Hacker News

What it’s like to dissect a cadaver

by yuppiemephisto on 11/10/22, 6:35 PM with 102 comments

• by at_a_remove on 11/11/22, 5:23 PM

  This wasn't full on dissection but ... my father was dating a coroner, who really wanted me to go to med school. However, my father was also ridiculously squeamish, to the point where even a few drops of blood could result in a faint. So, she decided to take me to an autopsy she had to sign off on, to see if I was also as delicate. My father refused to even enter the building, but there I am, with my first cadaver, which was a suicide.

  Local laws dictated that all bullet fragments be removed, and since it was a low-caliber bullet the man had fired into his head, it mostly bounced around in there. Originally, they had drilled a discreet hole and were trying to get everything out that way, but eventually had to do the full rectangle, with a Stryker autopsy saw.

  Suffice to say that I do not have my father's squeamishness.

• by zac_hudson on 11/11/22, 3:10 AM

  Firstly, its surprising that this school allows what would apparently be the lay public gain access to human anatomical gifts. In Canada, this is restricted to persons with a legitimate interest, ie med students and grad students in bioengineering/bio-adjacent fields.

  I think that the author is not an individual with such an interest was quite clear from the tone taken on this piece - most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person; for some reason the way this piece was written felt almost disrespectful.

• by petercooper on 11/11/22, 2:25 PM

  If this sort of thing interests you and you're in the UK, there's a show in the next couple of weeks called My Dead Body where a woman narrates her own dissection (through recordings and ML-based voice recreation): https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4-announces-movi... .. apparently the woman was the first (identifiable) person in the UK to donate their body for "public display".

• by bell-cot on 11/11/22, 3:33 PM

  Two observations I've heard from a young relative who has done cadaver dissection at scale, and is qualified to teach the subject in Med. School:

  - "You want a facility with good ventilation. Doesn't take an M.D. to understand that breathing the vapors from embalming fluids, intestine contents, etc. is bad."

  - "Once you get the head off, the rest is easy."

• by caycep on 11/11/22, 6:39 PM

  Honestly, from my experiences in medical school, cadavers smell strongly like formaldehyde, and all the tissues are brown, atrophied, and hard to distinguish. I remember realizing my understanding of anatomy (at least abdominal) increased way more from watching surgery on healthy tissue than an entire year of clinical anatomy courses...

• by zmxz on 11/11/22, 2:27 PM

  This sort of topic does not interest me, but I clicked, and to my surprise I gulped the article. This is one of the most interesting posts I've read on HN, ever. Awesome writeup, I love the POV of a non-expert in the field!

• by sergiotapia on 11/11/22, 2:43 PM

  I've been in medical schools where there were corpses and students all over the large hall. My first thought was wow each of these people had dreams, personalities and a soul. They were somebody. It gave me some comfort that the students were taught to respect the bodies and treat them with dignity. I wonder if that's all medical school or only this one because it was catholic.

  It seems OP doesn't care about this?

  Anyway, that's when I realized I could never be in that profession. I would have to become cold to it and I probably couldn't.

• by est31 on 11/11/22, 2:25 PM

  > If you exercise, we’ll know. Their insides just look different.

  I've seen some video footage of minimally invasive operations (during a dies academicus lecture) and OMG fat was just so ugly. I know it is a natural part of us but when I saw that footage I promised myself to do more sports.

  Or IDK what they were referring to.

• by incanus77 on 11/11/22, 4:39 PM

  My late wife was a physical therapist and in undergrad she had a gross anatomy class with a cadaver dissection. After the chest cavity was opened, they were supposed to go over the internal organs step by step, but her group instead found a plastic bag inside containing all of the organs. Apparently the autopsy had involved inspecting, weighing, etc. the organs which made for a somewhat confusing discovery once the class got in there.

• by falcor84 on 11/11/22, 2:31 PM

  On a related note, I would like to strongly recommend Jacob Geller's YouTube essay "What's the Point of Taking Apart a Body" [0]. It uses video games for the main examples, but goes quite deep in multiple directions in search of deeper meaning. I found it to be very poignant.

  [0] https://youtu.be/ohco3PB6eBw

• by potatototoo99 on 11/11/22, 12:33 PM

  For once an article I'm happy doesn't have pictures.

• by iends on 11/11/22, 4:24 PM

  I got to experience a cadaver lab when my wife was taking a gross anatomy course. By the time I visited they were pretty deep into the semester, so the bodies were pretty well cut up.

  I only saw people being respectful the two times I was there, after hours with only students and no professors around.

  The smell was terrible, not because of rotting flesh, but because the chemicals. I had more opportunities to visit, but couldn't really get over the smell so would just wait in the hall for my wife.

  I'm optimistic that I don't experience that many dead bodies again until I am one.

• by euroderf on 11/11/22, 3:30 PM

  Contemplating human innards makes me queasy PDQ. Somewhat relatedly, I unreservedly reject tattoos as a desecration of the gift of nature.

  That all being said, I agree, this essay was well-written and appropriately respectful. Thank you for posting !

• by s1mon on 11/11/22, 3:18 PM

  I spent three days in a cadaver lab with two severed heads. I was helping develop a tool to place a wound dressing in the sinuses after an ethmoidectomy. For most of the time we had cloth draped over most of the head except the nose, but I did end up seeing the severed neck and the faces. You really can’t unsee that.

  The facility we used also did animal experiments, which I really don’t want to know about, but there was an amazing photocopied chart taped up in the locker room with diagrams of how to put notches in mouse ears in order to encode numbers on them.

• by azalemeth on 11/12/22, 11:52 AM

  Great article. Some of my thoughts and experiences:

  -- most medical school cadavers look like jerky and smell weird -- most medical schools (in the UK at least) do not like students doing dissection; they prefer prosection (where someone competent has already made the cut) -- it was, for me, an increasingly weird feeling to realise that the images seen on medical imaging -- particularly axial (cross-sectional) t2 weighted MRI images, really really do look like reality, but with the colours in grey and white rather than odd shades of red, white and pink -- nobody feels emotional about a liver -- everybody feels emotional about hands, and doesn't expect to when they go in -- for actually understanding the Latin names of everything and the typical decorative layout of the human body, VR or just plain medical imaging are pretty damn good, arguably better than aforesaid interestingly smelling jerky -- for actually understanding that your future career will involve dealing with people's children or possibly parents in dire situations, that we are all naked under our clothes (and should just get over it as a society), and that, yes, we are all going to die, the dissection room can't be beat.

• by type0 on 11/12/22, 12:24 AM

  Gunther von Hagens has 4 great anatomical videos with dissection called Anatomy for Beginners, it aired on Channel 4 years ago, if you mostly want explanations here's great channel as well https://www.youtube.com/c/InstituteofHumanAnatomy/

• by nbadg on 11/11/22, 1:28 PM

  I took a cadaver lab as part of a functional biomechanics class during grad school. It was focused around, well, biomechanics -- how the body moves, how joints work, the mechanisms behind various injuries, that kind of thing. It was cross-listed between the engineering department and med school, so there were a good mix of people there. It was also only one component in an _extremely_ intensive course (I think we averaged something like 9-10hrs/week total on just that single course), but still IIRC (this was 2012ish) we spent around 1.5hrs with the cadaver every week for the whole semester. I also worked for a little while as an EMT, so I've dealt with patients while they're still alive, and I've done some (though just a little) work on the theoretical side of things, doing some research into various prostheses, osseointegration, and so forth, as part of my grad school coursework, plus some simulation work -- FEA, muscle activation models, that kind of things. It was very much a breadth search, and (for lack of a better word) I "enjoyed" every minute of it. Or maybe "rewarding" would be better here, I don't know. At least for me, it was a very unique headspace -- though one that I ultimately left, for reasons that aren't relevant here.

  I think it's okay to find the biological systems behind your own body fascinating, even to the point of excitement. There's a very good talk by John Cleese about the difference between seriousness and solemnity, and I see some very strong parallels here. It's also worth mentioning that western attitudes towards death are both historically a very new thing and also, well, weird. If you grew up in the west, it's likely all you're used to, but these days we live in a world that has dramatically less death in it than even 50 years prior. I mean, entire industries have sprung up around this almost... deification, this sanctification of death. And to be perfectly honest, I think it's unhealthy to think of something so deeply integral to the natural world as something to be so shy about. But perspective is always important to have; for me, I think often about the idea of death. To really internalize what it means, that this thing was once moving and breathing and thinking, with a rich inner existence, just like me. And yet I have a (sometimes extremely) dark sense of humor. Comes with the territory, I think.

  In the last day of our cadaver lab, we had some extra time, and we basically had, well, free reign. To be clear, at that point, the cadaver was in pretty rough shape. Turns out that pretty much everywhere on the body has muscle, bone, and connective tissue -- the exact things you're interested in from a biomechanics perspective. So pretty much the only two things left were inside the thoracic cavity, or the brain. There were other cadavers we could look at (but not dissect), so pretty much any of the end states we could just walk a few meters away and see. But looking at a diseased lung from an already-dissected cadaver still isn't the same as opening up the chest cavity yourself, so that's what we did. And it was deeply fascinating, even though it wasn't directly relevant to the class. That sense of... excited fascination... is something I can really relate to in the OP's article. I think that's okay, maybe even healthy, and I can imagine it being a powerful driver for people who decide to do, for example, biomechanics research. But again, perspective is important -- don't forget that you're standing there, dissecting, and the cadaver, well, can't do that anymore. So while I can absolutely emphasize with the fascination of it, the discovery of it...

  ...never in a million years would I consider bringing a _date_ to a cadaver lab.

• by robbiep on 11/11/22, 6:18 PM

  If anyone wants to get their head around anatomy, beautifully prepared, find ‘Ackland’s Anatomy’. It’s the visual bible. Beautifully prepared dissections from start to finish.

  It’s also much cleaner than the particularly tedious process of dissecting a entire human being, most of which consists of slowly stripping back skin and fat to get to the interesting stuff (Source: with 2 others, slowly dismantled an entire adult human male from whole body down to each individual muscle and tendon over a period of 4 months)

• by zeristor on 11/11/22, 6:07 PM

  Two amazing BBC documentaries, although not currently available:

  The Incredible Human Hand: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2md

  The Incredible Human Foot: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2rj

  This is listed as being shown in 2020, however I watched 2017 or so, perhaps it has been updated.

• by poulsbohemian on 11/12/22, 1:07 AM

  In college I got to spend a day at a cadaver lab, where the pre-meds taking that class acted as tour guides. It was one of the more meaningful experiences of my education such that I feel everyone should have the opportunity. I learned more about mammalian anatomy in that single experience than from any of the biology labs in which I'd been a student.

• by scandox on 11/11/22, 1:26 PM

  There is an excellent chapter in Ghost in The Throat[1] that answers this question in a somewhat more poetical fashion.

  [1] https://tramppress.com/product/a-ghost-in-the-throat-by-doir...

• by genghisjahn on 11/11/22, 2:25 PM

  Michael Crichton opens his book Travels with a pretty detailed description of dissecting the head of a cadaver.

• by astrea on 11/11/22, 5:17 PM

  > No wonder our feet have so many problems: they were once hands

  Isn't this backwards? Or am I mistaken about human evolution? My understand was that our ancestors were not arboreal and walked on all fours then we adapted to walking upright. Therefore, feet became hands.

• by type0 on 11/12/22, 12:28 AM

  > Corpses are ridiculously stiff. I couldn’t turn an arm over without risking snapping the wrist.

  Mary Roach has written a great book book with the same name about the same subject.

• by drtgh on 11/11/22, 12:45 PM

  With all due respect to the profession, but.. how does this kind of thing arrived to the front page with 5 points? HN, come on, really?