Devyn, that is really interesting. It’s kind of amazing to think that you know what it’s like to dismember bodies.
Sadly to say, I have never had employment that gave me spiritual experiences, though my employment in Baghdad a couple of years ago made me wonder on several occasions if I was ready to meet God.

I think maybe BYU owes me $400. When I was a graduate student, I taught human anatomy labs. The students in the advanced anatomy class dissected the cadavers, and then we used them for demonstration in the regular undergraduate class. Apparently, the professor who taught anatomy contracted with several other universities to provide cadavers. Part of the deal was that when they were finished, the cadavers would be returned to BYU for cremation. As I recall, someone had gone around with a BYU van and picked up eight or ten cadavers from who knows where. Then all the anatomy TAs had the opportunity to come to the lab one evening to dismember those cadavers, along with the two we had been using at BYU.

I don’t know that I’d call it a spiritual experience, however. Slightly disturbing is more like it. Dissecting human cadavers didn’t bother me at all, but cutting up bodies with a hacksaw is somehow seemed a little more disturbing. It does give me pause every once in awhile to know that I have something in common with Jeffery Dahmer. I did encounter an artificial hip that evening. It was actually quite interesting to see how the muscles had been attached.

My wife’s first year of medical school was also our first year of marriage. We had some very interesting conversations during the first month or so, when the students were essentially dissecting cadavers.

Speaking of odd medical jobs, here is a strange one. All the first year med students need to learn how perform a prostate exam and even just locate a prostate. At the U of U there is a guy (I’m told the same guy every year) that lays in an exam room while a line of medical students forms. Each student waiting their turn at putting their finger up there. He instructs them in such a way that they can all hear, “No, a bit further in. Ok, a little firmer, no that’s too hard.”

I hope I haven’t detracted too much from the spirit of this discussion.

Dan – I am sure it is an interesting experience – perhaps you are glad when your body is incinerated as it will stop being poked and prodded…

Dan E – I imagine the Iraq experience was much more interesting and frightening and long…

Ardis – good to know that Lawyers do have hearts – I had no idea :)

Left Field – you should submit a bill to BYU for your services. It is interesting how we each have different feelings about the same basic work.

I think BYU just considered it as part of my service as a TA. I think I might have viewed it a little differently if I’d taken them one at a time all the way through cremation. But to spend an evening doing nothing but sawing people into pieces was a bit odd.

When I was a postdoc at a medical school, they hired me one semester to help teach the gross anatomy labs. They had a morgue on site, and I was able to watch the process of embalming and preparing cadavers for use in the lab.

The professor who freaked out was a bit of an odd duck. She had been at the university since the ’40s and was a couple of generations removed from other faculty, and the last remaining faculty member in the department without a Ph.D. I was more than a little surprised by her reaction. BYU undergraduates work (or used to) routinely with cadavers with no lawsuits that I know of, so it hadn’t remotely occurred to me that anyone would think there would be a problem. I think she just had some personal issues with it.

Last year, I was asked to help dress a brother in his temple robes for burial. He had Alzheimer’s and had been in a nursing home since I’ve been in the ward, so I had never met him. Then a few months later I had the opportunity to perform the same service for my father. Those definitely qualify as spiritual experiences.

Devyn, you win, man. No way to top your experience. Fortunately you weren’t doing that at BYU, because you almost certainly would have run into people who protested your cremating the bodies.

Tagore – it was at a University North of BYU.

John – there were very strict rules. No naming of cadavers, no joking about the bodies, etc. The students received a long lecture on respect and dignity for the cadavers at the first of the semester and we did not tolerate any deviation from that.

Devyn,

That was in about 1990, so she would have been teaching at that university for 40-some years. I am now teaching at a Catholic and historically Black university.

John, both BYU and my postdoctoral institution had the same rules Devyn mentioned respecting the cadavers.

Interesting comments all around. I’m not a Morman, but always wondered about the LDS position on whole body donation, as I dated a Morman who was a body donor.

In the late 1980s, I worked for a transplant service, and participated in the harvesting of bones and tissue from recently deceased donors. As part of my training, I also toured gross anatomy labs. Generally, students are respectful of their cadavers, and most of them saw anatomy as a fun, learning experience.

At the time, many of my co-workers were body donors; these ladies persuaded me to sign up as a future body donor, as well. Personally, I have no problem with students and teaching assistants carving up my cadaver to learn anatomy — essentially, my memorial will be the skills that the future surgeons, and other physicians acquire from dissecting my cadaver.

Truthfully, I have no problem with my leftovers being hacked up for the incinerator, as Devyn describes. As the Bible says, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; ultimately, my cremains will be commingled with the ashes of dozens of men and women who served as body donors. This final disposition is selfless, spiritual, and respectful of the environment, as every donor is buried directly into the soil.

Despite the unpleasantries associated with dissection, it is necessary for medical training and research, and medicine’s centuries-old “rites of passage”, gross anatomy, should be deemed an honor to all people who donate their bodies for dissection.