A Missed Opportunity: Humanities in Anatomy Lab

A first-year medical student's first patient is already dead. For decades, the cadaver, or body donor, has been the human body on which students first examine, cut, identify, and discover. That the student forms a detachment from the body and the person who once occupied the body, however, initiates a pedagogical series of events that is difficult to undo at best and may be harmful at worst. This process reveals gaps in the anatomical instruction process that present a missed opportunity to educate future physicians in a way that not only maintains their humanity and capacity for empathy but also enhances it. The anatomy lab should be a place where early medical students converse about death and begin to confront their own feelings of discomfort and hesitation. Relying on a metaphor of disappearance, as articulated by Jewson, this paper reframes this problem and offers new ways of improving human anatomy instruction through a brief examination of the history of anatomy in general, the history of the actual human being (body donor) in particular, and the response of the student through humanities-based interventions and content. In what follows, we consider the existing gaps, the possible curricular options for enhanced education, and the potential benefits of incorporating a more robust humanities curriculum in the anatomy laboratory for first-year medical students.