My First Cadaver Lab Experience

My professors want to produce not only doctors with skillful hands, but doctors with a sense of humanity. And respect for a cadaver on the table helps teach compassion for living patients in the office, ethics professors say.

Anatomy lab, also known as cadaver lab, has long been a rite of passage for those committed to a life of healing. In the early 1800s, medical faculty first began lobbying for legal, as well as social, recognition of the need for human dissection to further surgical knowledge. By the 1900s, the cadaver lab became a fixture in the medical school curriculum.

As we entered the cadaver lab on the fourth floor of Humber College North in Etobicoke at 10:00 a.m., the highly concentrated smell of preservatives quickly overloaded our senses. Some placed their jackets or sleeves over their noses and mouths. Unsure of our body's reactions to both the sights and smells, we continued onward. Rows of stainless steel coffin-like containers, known simply as holding tanks, filled the room. On top of each container were partially dissected bodies, internal organs exposed, and one untouched body. Plastic buckets labeled "whole brains", "hearts", etc. could be seen on a shelf. Holding an actual human brain in my hands was priceless.

We gathered around the first cadaver peering down at the exposed viscera and detached sternum and rib cage. We immediately noticed the vertical column of steel wire spiraling down the sternum. This patient once had open heart surgery. Our professor stood next to the body and began to point out some of the various parts. He picked up the detached heart and quickly without hesitation promptly placed it in my hands. A little startled, I began to pull back the folds of cut muscle exposing the chambers. And so the the experience began.

And what an amazing experience it was.

Our body is such an incredible design. It's a huge honor for me to be a part of medicine, but it's even more special to be a part of homeopathic medicine. Though I may have to explain what an H.D. means from time to time (sometimes in a slightly defensive tone to the skeptics), I'm learning what it means to be an H.D. Someday soon (fingers crossed) those two letters will come after my name, and I can't wait for that day.