We know from Mary Roach’s oddly cheerful book, Stiff, that human cadavers play an unseen but important role in everything from bullet testing to automobile safety. Of course, cadavers are also central to medical education. Learning anatomy by dissecting an anonymous body is a rite of passage for future doctors.
It’s also an expensive ritual. As medical imaging technology improves, some medical schools are seeking to replace live dissection with computer simulation. One school in Indiana is going in the opposite direction. They are integrating dissection into the entire curriculum by making the cadaver a doctor’s first patient.
As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, students at Indiana University Northwest meet relatives of the deceased to gain a fuller picture of how the person lived, not just how she died. The students learn a more holistic approach to medicine, applying the lessons of their histology class to the tissues they examined.
For their part, the family members gain insight into their family’s health history. The husband of one donor plans to attend the graduation of the students who dissected his wife. This approach models not only good pedagogy, but also good clinical practice.