Erika’s small hands are shaking. Clumsy in purple rubber gloves, her fingers are holding a short, thin blade significantly sharper than a razor. It takes her several minutes to secure the blade safely in the handle of her scalpel. This isn’t the first time she’s sliced into human flesh – or even the first time she’s worked on Vincent, a 61-year-old victim of pancreatic cancer. But Erika feels the weight of responsibility. Vincent’s corpse is one of five precious bodies recently received at the University of Oregon anatomy lab. Several students are getting their equipment ready for today’s dissecting session. There’s a low hum of conversation. Over in the corner, a radio is tuned to a soft-rock station. Bryan Adams is singing: “...cuts like a knife...but it feels so right...yeah...”

Erika, a 19-year-old sophomore, never saw a dead body until a few months ago. She is not a medical student. This is not a medical school. But today she will peel off Vincent’s skin with the intention of exposing his joints, tendons and muscles, arteries and veins. She could’ve signed up to dissect his head or body, but she chose his lower left leg. She wants to explore the knee and ankle, two of what she says are the “coolest” joints in the human body.

A major in Human Physiology, Erika registered with the rest of her peers last fall for a course called Human Anatomy. “I vaguely knew there was a lab section,” she says, “but when I looked at the handouts the night before the lab I realized, ‘anatomy lab,’ uh...that’s dead people.” With only a day to adjust to the idea, she was unprepared for the realities. “I’d be fine in the lab, and then go home and start crying,” she says. And that was Erika’s reaction to bodies that were already dissected, objectively presented as three-dimensional learning aids. As difficult as the experience was, she was at least relieved that she personally didn’t have to do the dissecting. (That opportunity came two terms later.)

Erika’s reaction is normal. Thankfully, we humans aren’t designed to go around cutting each other up. Those who have to do it – first-year medical students in a “rite of passage” that forces them to confront death and develop the emotional equivalent of thick skin – often approach the experience with a mix of anxiety and fear. The rest of us relate to cadavers as props in old horror movies, dug up in the dead of night by hunchbacked grave robbers. But social attitudes toward cadavers haven’t always been so dark.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, educational dissections were often conducted in the marketplace, open to public scrutiny (and fresh breezes). This was supposed to ensure that the cadavers were obtained legitimately and treated decently. On the downside, students had to climb over each other to view the open body, and lacking any methods of preserving the flesh, the entire anatomy lesson had to be conducted in a single day.

In early American history, criminal executions provided the only legal source of cadavers. With the demand for bodies outstripping the supply of criminals, grave robbing became a profitable, if unpopular, career. Bodysnatching remained common in the U.S. into the early 20th century. It was not until after the World War II, when science showed that research with cadavers could lead to “medical miracles,” that the idea of body and organ donation took hold. The federal government finally passed the Uniform Anatomic Gift Act in 1967. A decade later, the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, established a Willed Body Program to serve as the state’s cadaver clearinghouse for education and research purposes. Today the program handles about 200 bodies a year, five of which are being dissected by Erika’s class. Many people think that body donation is a way to get out of paying for funeral expenses. In fact, the donor’s estate must pay for a special preservative embalming process and for transportation to OHSU.

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