Friendly Skulls, Mechanical Bodies: Encounters with Cadavers in a Medical School in Egypt

Anatomy and cadavers trigger fear and produce contradictory responses. In these circumstances, allegedly Western models of learning and the exposure to death have to be appropriated to become viable. Furthermore, references to the religious and cultural backgrounds of students shape their responses. According to students, death is an event when the deceased acquires supernatural powers; thus, they take shield in religion to ward off potential dangers caused by spirits. The exposure to the interior of the body also produces heightened feelings of religiosity and perceiving the body as a miracle. Befriending skulls and body parts and giving them names are strategies to humanize dead bodies and render them familiar. However, in order to legitimize working with cadavers and the dissection of bodies, students tend to dehumanize cadavers and observe them as mechanical objects.