Friday, August 18, 2006

Flatliners

On Wednesday this week, I joined up with Magic Pants' and UroVision's dissection group, to replace absent members. Here, we don't actually do dissections in class; instead, we work with prosections prepared by the anatomy professor and a couple of his assistants. This also avoids the problem of obtaining donors; they are quite rare, and needless to say, bodies obtained from foreign sources are not necessarily true donors, if you know what I mean. However, students who wish to dissect can still do so after hours, as part of the dissection club. However, due to limited availability last year, we ended up having to join the dissection group via a lottery, and of course, I didn't get in. Well, with people dropping out all the time, I have finally gotten my chance. The lab is deep in the basement, hidden away from the eyes of all. It was good to get in there; my anatomy knowledge is terrible, so I always felt that this would be crucial to my learning.

In unrelated news, I need to eat less kimchi noodle soup. I had something else to say, but I forget what it was...

4 comments:

Marysienka said...

we dont do dissections either, but we can take an optional anatomy/dissection class during summer (i think it's 6 week long, may-june). We're lucky to have bodies, because other universities dont have any (or only a couple). We've got the same problem, bodies are getting quite rare, but more and more people want to dissect. I'm not into that much, but I agree it's a good way to know your anatomy. I suck in anatomy. Netter doesn't do it for me I guess.

Tall Medstudent said...

We had two donors available to the students last year. A couple more were used for prosections, apparently, since older prosections had been returned to their families for burial. Ethical treatment of donors is considered paramount here...

It makes me wonder where big schools like U of T, or all those American medical and dental schools get their bodies. I would have to guess India or China, where the trade in bodies is questionable, to say the least. I think that universities don't like discussing the matter, if they aren't using local donors only...

Marysienka said...

I think, for the dissection class, they have something like 8 bodies. 40 students, 5ppl/body. Those bodies are then used for the anatomy labs we have with each class. And of course we have a bunch of heads/legs/lungs/etc. Kinda gross when you open a table where there are heads only. ugh! I've heard we trade corpses with California (the reason why we have so many black people? ;))...
However, every year there's the same debate over the dissection lab, as whether or not they will close it... we're working hard on keeping it "alive" (!), studying anatomy on computers isn't as good. nothing beats reality.

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