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Cadavers offer hands-on experience to health majors |
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Thursday, 20 March 2008 |
by NIKKI ROBERTI
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
Light music plays in the background as students gather in a small room, ready to work.
A strange odor fills the air as they open the large, metal container revealing their class assignment.
It’s a dead body.
Health, Leisure and Exercise Science professor Greg Landry teaches the two-semester pre-professional anatomy and physiology class and organizes labs, including those with cadavers.
“I try to [have music playing while they’re working],” Landry said. “I
think it kind of lightens things up a little bit. If it’s dead silent,
it can be boring for students.”
 Professor Greg Landry shows a pluck in the specimen storage room in the Holmes Convocation Center. Photo by Holt Menzies
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The department usually has two cadavers at a time, which are kept in a lab at the bottom of Holmes Convocation Center, he said.
The cadavers are obtained from East Tennessee State University Medical School.
“These are people who donated their bodies to science,” Landry said.
“The medical school handles embalming the bodies so they’ll last a year
or two for dissection. Once we’re complete, we send all [the pieces]
back to the family and they cremate it for a service.”
Landry said the cadavers tend to be bodies of elderly people.
Currently the lab is working on two males over the age of 60.
“It smelled really bad,” health promotion major Laren M. Yacobi said of
her first experience with the cadaver. “[It] was kept in a huge
refrigerator type thing that looked like a stainless steel coffin. It
was cool to actually see the muscles and stuff like that in person on a
real person.”
Landry said the purpose for working on cadavers is to provide real
hands-on experience for students wanting to work in a medical field.
“[For] physical therapists and occupational therapists who do many
muscle-related things [like dealing] with injuries…it’s invaluable for
them,” Landry said. “There’s nothing like seeing the real thing.”
Hannah E. Crawford, a sophomore exercise science pre-professional
major, enjoys the experience she has received from the anatomy and
physiology classes.
“This has been such a great experience because in lecture we hit the
physiology and in lab we cover the anatomy by actually viewing it and
getting hands-on experience,” Crawford said. “Things can look
completely different in a picture than they actually are in the body.”
Originally, Crawford said she was nervous when viewing the cadaver for
the first time, but after being eased into it, she doesn’t mind it
anymore.
Landry said it is not uncommon for students to be uneasy about working with a cadaver and often people will faint.
“Initially, about 90 percent of students, as you would expect, would be
pretty queasy,” he said. “It’s a unique experience for most people. But
once they get used to it, most students are fairly comfortable.”
Landry said 10 or 20 percent even go as far as to love working on the cadavers.
He said those kinds of students are the “surgeon types.”
Another 10 or 20 percent, however, maintain a difficulty with even coming in the room, Landry said.
For that group of students, the lab can be a breaking point for those considering a career in the medical field, he said.
“Obviously if you can’t handle this, then medical school isn’t going to
work,” Landry said. “I think it really defines what you’re interested
and what you’re capable and not capable of.”
Students also dissect animal organs in pairs for a more detailed, hands-on experience since the human organs are limited.
Landry said the lab tries to help the students gain a real understanding of how the body functions.
For example, when students study the pancreas, Landry said the students
draw their own blood to test their glucose, or blood sugar, levels.
Then he has them eat a lot of sugar and watch how the level goes up.
“You really learn to appreciate how much your body does on a daily basis and how incredibly built we are,” Crawford said.
Students are almost finished with one of the cadavers, Landry said.
After sawing open the head to look at the brain and chest, the body will be sent back in exchange for a female cadaver.
Between the cadavers, animal organ dissections, and personal function
analyses, Landry said the program is very relevant and valuable for
students and their future careers.
“It kind of brings it to life,” he said.
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