Use of Cadavers in Undergraduate Schools

How amazing that people are donating their bodies to science when they pass away? I think it’s incredible and I think I would like to donate mine in the future. However I would prefer to have it is donated to Medical Schools. One of my coworkers took human gross anatomy as an undergraduate at Rochester Institute of Technology. Initially I was pretty upset with her because I felt like students in undergrad would not appreciate the donation to its full potential. I have done dissections in my anatomy lab of a cow eye and sheep brain. I know that people often don’t appreciate those but I’m not sure how comparable that to a human body. My coworker then told me she decided that she doesn’t want to get into the medical field anymore the semester after. This made even more upset since now she took away a spot from someone else that might have got more out of it. Although she explained to me that the experience was very valuable to her and helped guide her onto what she actually wanted to do with her education in the future. She also said that the bodies are not just studied by her class but many others. Student in the Physician Assistant programs also study the bodies on a micro scale and art majors get to practice drawing models which could be used later in the anatomy books we study from.

This made me feel much better with cadavers being used in undergraduate studies. I also realized after taking this class that all the people who donated their bodies provided consent which is extremely important. She also told me that after the class is done the body gets cremated and sent back to their family members. I thought this was amazing since it provides the respect portion of I was concerned about. It provides closure for the family. Just like we read in Fortunes Bones by Marilyn Nelson “It wasn’t just a bunch of bones. It was the remains of someone’s son, maybe someone’s father.” And “The bones told how Fortune labored, suffered and dies: A quick, sudden injury, like whiplash, may have snapped a vertebra in his neck. He did not drown or fall from a cliff. He was not hanged. But he was free.” Closure for the family and respect for the body is an important final step to honor the individual. It is also closure for the soul which is important to individuals with those beliefs.

I did not change my mind about where I would like my body to go in the future. However, I do feel much better about the use of cadavers in undergraduate institutions. I like that they are used in ways I wasn’t even aware of like model drawing and the fact that they provide with proper closure for the family after.

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