Medical students recount first encounter with cadavers

The class, which is held in an anatomy laboratory where the preserved bodies are kept, involves cutting open the different parts of the body for examination.

Although it has increasingly become possible to see what a body is made up of without dissection, in the study of anatomy, training facilities in Uganda still depend on the traditional methods of cutting or dissection. 

Reagan Emoru, a fifth-year Medical student recounts his first-time experience with a class full of bodies as traumatizing.   According to Emoru, walking into a class with bodies laid naked on tables and the air in the anatomy circulated with chloroform was traumatizing.  

Emoru told URN that he had decided to quit the class until he went through a series of counselling sessions.    

"My first experience was like a nightmare. I was not fine that evening, seeing dead bodies, the scent, and the chloroform. The first time I entered into the room, I saw dead bodies lying on tables. I moved out of the lab immediately. My classmates came out and tried to counsel me, but I did not go back that very day,” he recounts.  

Emoru notes that unlike the time he joined Makerere University in 2015, the bodies are now covered with cloth before exposure to students which lessens the trauma.         

Gilbert Busingye, a fourth-year student says that because he had heard stories about such a class before, he stood firm during his first encounter. However, he adds that inhaling the chloroform in the room made him dizzy and would often send him to unusual sleep.  

He says that after getting accustomed to the environment, working with bodies became a wonderful experience that built his confidence to work on live patients besides learning body structures and where they are located.  But he adds that it’s easier when working on a person, with whom they have no emotional attachment.    

“The most important thing to learn from there is the structure of the human body. Dead bodies cannot give you an actually review of the human being, especially these ones which are so old. It is a wonderful experience because you get to see something close to the actual thing. It helps us to gain the confidence of handling human beings,” Busingye says.

Namuyomba Majorine, a second-year student says that the experience brought her to the reality of death.  She, however, adds that with time, she came to learn that bodies are merely learning objects as frogs and rats would be during High School Biology practical lessons.  

“The first thing that came to my mind when I entered that room was death is real. Because I realized that these things which were once living beings were now used used as specimen. I was freaked out and ran out of the lab and stayed out for close to 30 minutes.”

Another student who prefers anonymity says that although he was mentally prepared, and bodies were a scare, the practicality of it became challenging during the first two classes, where he only looked on as brave students dissected the bodies.  

“For the first two days, I hesitated from cutting those bodies. We began with the limbs, so I would look on as the brave ones dissected.”

Human cadaveric dissection has been used as the core teaching tool in anatomy for centuries.

“In Alexandria the practice of human cadaveric dissection was the dominant means of learning anatomy and it was here that Herophilus of Chalcedon and his younger contemporary Erasistratus of Ceos became the first ancient Greek physicians to perform systematic dissections of human cadavers in the first half of 3rd century BC,” Sanjib Kumar writes in his research: “Human cadaveric dissection: a historical account from ancient Greece to the modern era”