Reflections on dissection: leave no student behind

Dissection is being reduced--and even removed--from the medical curriculum in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. Dissection's contribution to the curriculum is too important to be diminished. To understand the human body, students must dissect. To avoid anatomical complications, future surgeons need the knowledge they can gain from dissection. Cadavers reveal the uniqueness of each body and the body's strength and fragility, which cannot be learned from books or computers. Cadavers offer surgical skill-building opportunities and confrontation with death. For all its strengths, however, dissection alone does not teach everything the student needs to know. Other educational tools (books, CT and MRI, animation of developmental processes) successfully fill in gaps of knowledge. Surgeons and educators must recognize the threat that decreased dissection poses to our students and patients. They must take steps to support dissection in the medical curriculum or, if it has disappeared, to bring it back.