Speaking from first-hand, I can't remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a "gift of body" ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.
I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.
Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:
- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery
- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.
- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.
- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."
Also speaking from first hand I remember quite a bit of "disrespect". Jokes were outright common. The vast majority of interactions were respectful of course -- its hard work studying anatomy after all. But TBH many folks in medicine can be quite callous, which I find not unrelated to the task at hand (i.e. dealing with the crazy and brutal facts of us all being mushy living creatures at a much higher rate than most people). Standing in a room full of dead bodies being dissected... isn't really normal. And it takes a toll.
> Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."
Thought provoking. I'll keep this in mind while holding a hundred billion apples during lunch. ;)
From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands. And there's also something in the brain that has been lost, something beyond mere physical matter. An easy example of this is a puzzle, if you're putting a puzzle together, and I come in and mix it up, I've taken something from you, and yet I took no material object away. There's probably some organization that's part of our brain and "humanity" that is lost at death. I'm not talking about religious "spirit" here - back to the puzzle, it has no spirit, but an assembled puzzle is more than the physical material it is made of.
I don't mean to be super critical of your lab partner, just sharing some additional philosophical views.
> From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands.
I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.
A large amount of computation takes place in the gut, largely by the foreign bacteria that make up our gut flora, and the gut has direct lines of two-way communication with the brain. Hence the term "gut feeling".
The brain certainly does a lot of heavy lifting, but I think if you took a person's brain out of their human body and into a robot body instead, they'd probably have dramatic shifts in personality, behavior, thought processes, feelings, worldview, etc. It would probably be on a similar level as those experiments where people use magnetic or electric pulses on their brain or whatever and observe large personality changes.
The comment you're replying to is talking about discussion of the experience (hopefully after the fact). I don't think that they're claiming the bodies are being disrespectfully handled. I'm assuming they're talking about the black humor people use to cope with being surrounded by illness and death.
Mom's a nurse, so it never struck me as odd or mean-spirited. It finally dawned on me when she cracked a joke in response to a question grandma asked about a work story mom was telling at a family get-together. It went over grandma's head, thankfully. It was a pretty good pun, but I think that was the first time I realized that not everyone is used to that sort of talk.
I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.
Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:
- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery
- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.
- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.
- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."