Senior Holly Frankfurt traced her scribbled drawing of an aortic aneurysm with her index finger, pointing out the different parts of an unexpected obstruction she found in a cadaver last fall. In a soft, patient voice, she explained what she had seen in simple terms: “The aorta comes down from the heart, but there was a bulge around it. So we opened up the bulge, and the actual part where the blood could flow through was really, really skinny. It was calcified and hard, almost like bone, so there wasn’t much space for the blood.”
Frankfurt, a pre-medical biology major, recalled that the aneurysm came as a surprise to her and her fellow Human Gross Anatomy students. Carefully following the instructions in the dissection atlas, Frankfurt and her team had cut into their cadaver, expecting to find an aorta similar to the depiction in their book. Instead, they came upon the strange bulge.
This aneurysm, along with startling bleeds, withered muscles, and excess fatty tissue, make Hillsdale’s cadavers some of the biology department’s best teachers. Though students plan their dissections according to textbook diagrams and plastic models, their scalpels cut through the irregularities and surprises of human flesh.
The lessons learned here are inherently unique, due to the nature of the human body. The fact that undergraduate students have the opportunity to learn these lessons is equally uncommon: the Moss Laboratory Wing boasts one of the few cadaver labs in the country that is accessible to undergraduate students.
“Very few undergraduate schools have a cadaver lab, and the few that do have a cadaver lab, they typically keep the cadaver for four or five years or longer,” Professor of Biology Dan York said. “There’s a limited amount of learning that can be done on a cadaver that has been around for quite some time. What’s unusual about us is that we get fresh cadavers each year from University of Michigan’s medical school, from the Department of Anatomical Donations.”
Once home to courses preparing students for vocational pursuits in the medical field, the cadaver lab has gone through an immense transformation. York modified the old anatomy courses to fit Hillsdale’s “academic-driven” style, and registration numbers began to climb. As the labs attracted pre-physical therapy, pre-medical, exercise science, sports studies, and honors students, York added a second cadaver.
“The college said, okay, there’s a need — students are finding quite a bit of value in this course, so they let me get a second cadaver,” York said. “That allowed me to open up the class to more students.”
The department added a third cadaver to the lab last fall.
York starts his academic year teaching Human Gross Anatomy, but students begin their time in the cadaver lab with Anatomy and Physiology. In the fall semester, those taking HGA dissect the entire cadaver, and entry-level students examine the prosected pieces in the spring to learn basic anatomy.
The opportunity to work with cadavers during undergraduate anatomy and physiology courses give Hillsdale students an edge on their applications and in future classrooms. Senior Michael Gatt explained that even students from large state schools had never had access to a cadaver lab.
“Ironically, the very first class I will be taking in medical school is anatomy and we will be using cadavers, so I will be that much more prepared, and will have that much more respect for the cadavers after having gone through it already,” Gatt said.
Respect for the human life the cadavers once held was a lesson well-learned inside the lab. Frankfurt explained in a sober tone that a fine line existed between recognizing the humanity of the body they dissected and dwelling on the death they examined. The somber knowledge that she worked with a body that was once living was nearly overwhelming.
“It was in the back of our minds all semester,” Frankfurt said. “We didn’t actually think about it that much, but we all realized that we were affected by it. By the end of the semester we were ready to be done. We realized that we were doing this because we want to be physicians. We want to help people live, we want to help people who are alive,.”
York explained that the best way to show respect to the deceased was to learn from them. He referenced the text engraved on a plaque hanging in the Department of Anatomical Donations at the University of Michigan to drive his point home:
“When a family entrusts us with one of their most sacred possessions, you have an obligation to keep faith with them by conducting yourself professionally, respectfully and ethically as though they were ever present. The families and the people themselves who donate their bodies to the University of Michigan have given this charitable, irreplaceable gift to you in confidence that you will gain understanding and knowledge of the human body. So embrace this gift with excitement and be eager to use the gift which you will have forever… the gift of knowledge.”
