The Importance Of Human Dissection

In chapter one of, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach talks about using corpses (cadavers) to demonstrate medical procedures. Mary Roach, joins a facial anatomy and face lift review class during the beginning of her book, where she watched physicians practice on lifeless bodies with no heads. Roach gathered an understanding that detached heads can be extremely intimidating, even for trained professionals. Mary Roach asks one of the physicians, Theresa, how she handles working with these detached heads on a daily basis. Theresa explained that she always imagined the heads to be made of wax when she worked with them. Later the chapter one, Mary Roach clarifies that “objectification is the coping mechanism.” (Roach, 2004. Page 56) The coping mechanism permits specialists to divide “the object” which looks like a living human without having emotions attached.

The word autopsy derives from the Greek word autopsia, which means “the act of seeing for oneself” (Autopsy 1). An autopsy purpose is to “determine the cause of death, observe the effects of disease” (Autopsy 1). Human dissection was frowned upon until after the Middle Ages. The first human dissection was performed in 300 BCE by Herophilus and Erasistratus, two physicians who were studying disease (Autopsy 2). In the late 2nd century CE a Greek physician Galen of Pergamum was the first

Based on color, the cartilage was whitish in color while the bone was cream colored. The cartilage was relatively more flexible than the bone. On composition, bone is made up of calcium while cartilage is made up of hyaline materials. Upon piercing with a knife, the bone is resistant to piercing. On application of more force, it cracks and breaks unevenly as compared to the cartilage that is less resistant to piercing and was cut clean through upon application of a relatively lesser

In my human anatomy teaching laboratories, the animal dissection experience generally emphasizes the isolation and

To study the inner anatomy of the human body, scientists needed cadavers, or dead bodies, to dissect. At this time, there was very limited access to cadavers, which led to body snatching, also known as grave robbing, becoming extremely common. Surgeons and anatomists would go

Take the High altitude ‘experiment’, also conducted a Dachau under Dr. Rascher, for example. In this experiment Rascher wanted to ‘find’ the best way to save German pilots who ejected at high altitudes. Rascher had subjects put into low pressure chambers “that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 feet, and monitored their physiological response as they succumbed and died.”(Tyson) If Rascher were testing for Pilot survival, he would no that the pressure would slowly increase, as the ejected pilot slowly parachuted down to the ground. Rascher, however, kept the pressure chamber at a set pressure, incorrectly representing how the human body would react to ejecting at high altitude. Furthermore, if the point of the experiment was to save pilots from high altitudes, why did they let some of the subjects die in the chamber? Shouldn’t they be testing ways to revive them, rather than kill them? Even worse, to the subjects that survived the chamber, Rascher would perform vivisections, “[dissecting] victims’ brains while they were still alive to show that high-altitude sickness resulted from the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of a certain part of the brain.”(Tyson) The dissections of the brain to discover the formation of blood vessel could easily have been discovered in autopsy. Sure, this would require the subject to die, but at least they wouldn’t have died by having their skull cracked

accidents. I like this chapter a lot because it offers other benefits of cadavers than just dissection.

Although grave robbing was not as large an issue after the passing of the Anatomy Act, the field still had its darkest times ahead. During the 19th and early 20th century, anatomists took advantage of the most disadvantaged sections of society including the mentally ill, people of color and poor immigrants (Cutter 2002, Halperin 2007). While these atrocities are worth remembering, anatomy truly reached its lowest point during the regime of the National Socialist Party. Corpses from concentration camps, mental facilities, and prisons were all sent to aid in research and teaching (Kaiser 2013). Throughout history, anatomists have put their morals aside for the sake of scientific advancement, but it is clear that this reached its most inexcusable

Mary Roach starts her research of human cadavers by going to a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course. There, Roach learns that surgeons survive by modifying human remains. The author sees the distinct benefit of learning surgical methods using cadavers. Cadavers feel no agony and cannot die due to problems, cadavers offer immediate benefits for surgical study. Roach sees this as a great upgrade over how the surgery was once taught to live patients without the advantage of anesthesia.

Starting soon after the achievements of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, in 460 BC Greek medicine and treatments began to intensely develop and improve due to anatomical research. Ancient physicians and anatomists such as Erasistratus, Herophilus, Galen, and Andreas Vesalius conducted dissections on live and dead organisms to lead them to make important discoveries about the anatomy, functionality, and overall health of humans. With passing time, each person built off of their influences work by testing validity, expanding on research, and all the meanwhile making their own discovers. However, human dissection and vivisection experiments were limited due to conflicts with ethnics and the ways of the Catholic Church. There was also the

Anatomy, the study of the human body, is a discipline of the medical sciences that flourished beyond precedent during the 17th and 18th centuries in Western Europe. During this time, many physicians, anatomists, and doctors began to not only investigate anatomy more seriously, but also to teach anatomy to more people. Dissections of cadavers became more common at learning establishments and more accepted by the general public, and by government authorities. Anatomical theatres were constructed for the mass teaching of dissections, and any and all bodies from criminal hangings were donated as cadavers to the universities. As trends grow and become popular problems are bound to become known. In anatomy, this problem was the shortage of cadavers

Through a little research on the internet, a website called “Bodies Revealed” informed me of the process used to preserve the bodies, which is known as “polymer preservation.” The bodies that are used first are embalmed according to standard procedures and perfused with a preserving agent to prevent the normal tissue decay that takes place after death. After the body is embalmed, a trained dissector prepares it, or a part of it, according to predetermined guidelines. Because of the degree of difficulty involved in dissecting a full body specimen, it can take several months to complete. If the dissector is working with individual organs, they can be prepared much more quickly. After the dissection is complete, the specimens are thoroughly rinsed in cold running water, which removes as much of the preserving agent as possible. Rinsing a full-body specimen can take up to one week to finish. After the rinsing, the specimen is ready to be dehydrated. They dehydrate the specimens by placing it in acetone, which acts to replace all of the tissue water present in the specimen. The specimen is then impregnated with a mixture of liquid silicone polymer and a crosslinker. The polymer hardens during a curing process, which leaves a dry, odorless specimen that doesn’t decompose. I had the

For the past two-hundred years, dissection of the human cadaver has been the gold standard for teaching aspiring medical professionals the networking and layout of the human body. Surprisingly, cadaver usage has had a rather curious history.

New science was discovered by dissecting criminal bodies to find out how we were put together. Leonardo da vinci is well known for his anatomical sketches of the human body. He would dissect dead human remains and then draw what he saw. Dissection was completely illegal unless one was a physician, which Leonardo was not.Leonardo da vinci would get a grave robbers, and eventually a hospital director would get him a body to study. He was able to identify not only muscles and bones, but also their functions in the body, which was incredible. Unluckily leonardo was not able to share

The past two weeks of dissection have been very valuable learning opportunities and extremely enjoyable. Dr Molyneux and the demonstrators were so helpful and caring; I felt they truly made a difference to how much I understood from this dissection experience. As well as this, I feel very privileged to have been given this opportunity to dissect a human body and would like to thank the individual who kindly donated their body for this purpose.