JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

My first year of college I got a job answering phones and doing data entry. This particular professor wanted to create a database of scientists from association information. Perhaps I should have thought more about taking the job.

I was only too eager to leave my first campus employer, Food Services. I had gotten tired of changing clothes so I could get soiled with spills, tired of doling out scrod and various mystery specialties, inhaling their aromas, and tired of maintaining a microbiologist’s nightmare: the salad bar.

So I found a desk job. Comfy. No clothing change required. I could go and sit for a few hours and type. And get paid okay. There were a few other students who sat in the back with me and typed on the terminals. It seemed to be a small lab, white walls, books, nothing unusual. I could live with this work.

It was in the Department of Morphology. I didn’t think too much about that title. I thought it meant some specialty study of development or anatomy, some branch of biological science.

It wasn’t until I subbed for the receptionist one day and answered the phone. Then the questions came:
– How can I donate my body?
– Have you seen my mother? She died three days ago.
– This is the Newspaper. We’re wondering if you have the body of an accident victim?

Suddenly I understood why no one discussed where the professor went. The large rooms behind his office. What he was wheeling in the hallway.
It was where they kept The Bodies. This office coordinated cadavers for the Medical School students to use. This professor taught the anatomy course.

The professor retired during my years on campus. Looks like though he might be out of a job anyway. Or at least no more collecting bodies at the college. No more answering phone calls from the Enquirer.

An article in today’s Seattle Times declares Med schools turning away from human dissections :

For nearly a century, the dissection of human cadavers has been a dreaded and honored rite of passage for budding doctors.

But over the last two decades, the field has lost prominence at medical schools — the victim of overly packed curriculums, a shortage of teachers and a general sense that dissection is an antiquated chore in a high-tech world.

Cutting back lab time

Most medical schools have already scaled back the time students now spend in the anatomy lab to give them more time to study molecular biology or genetics. A few have eliminated dissection as a requirement for being a doctor. When UCSF, one of the top medical schools in the United States, did away with the requirement two years ago, it sent shudders through the field of anatomy.

The future is moving toward ready-to-view, professionally dissected specimens (known as “prosections”) that allow students to scoot in and out of class with a minimum of mess, and computer simulations that do away with cadavers entirely.

“There’s a lot of problems with cadavers,” said Vic Spitzer, director of the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. “They are like leather. They smell. They’re oily. They’re hard to work with.”

I wonder whether dissecting a cadaver would have encouraged the desensitization to death , one of the reasons why I didn’t become a doctor.

I’m curious what Enoch or anyone else thinks about this change in medical education: Would you rather do dissection on cadavers? Or learn via simulation and already prepared specimens? What did you gain or lose by your time in anatomy class? Was it worth it? Should cadavers be required?