Anatomy Lab: What to expect in your first year
A NextGen Advice to the Next Generation
Article
By William R. Walter
The first few weeks of medical school are fraught with anxiety-provoking experiences. Ask any first-year medical student, and they will tell you that chief among these is the first day of anatomy lab. Perhaps at the root of this anxiety is the idea of facing death – merely a theoretical figment to most inexperienced students – in the flesh. Many feel sadness as they look upon the physical remnants of a human life that has ended. Others feel squeamish about disrupting the natural order of the body as they cut through skin, peel away muscle and dissect out organs.
None of these feelings are avoidable, nor, I believe, should one try to avoid them. As much as you might want to look away from your first cadaver, avoiding the sight will only delay the inevitable. In the beginning of the course, my anatomy instructor liked to remind us that if we ever began to feel anxious, sad, or guilty about our dissection, we should think about how the donor and his family would want us to feel. We are taught to treasure our donor's gift—their body, and our first patient—as a rare window into the human body that we will probably never have again. With these thoughts in mind, I found that over the following weeks and months, I began working diligently, even enthusiastically, on my cadaver.
A widely-held fear among medical students is that anatomy lab engenders indifference to mortality. Medical schools have begun to address these concerns. At the University of Michigan, we attend a memorial service for the deceased, attended by the entire medical school class, the anatomy faculty, and the donors' families. This ceremony imbued our anatomy course with sincerity and gratitude that have persisted throughout the year.
Anatomy lab may be among the greatest causes of anxiety to a new medical student, but I believe most of my peers have found it to be among the most fascinating and rewarding experiences of their educational lives. More than memorizing names and locations of muscles, arteries, and nerves, I have found learning anatomy on a human cadaver to be a profound process, the first among many rites of passage we will experience on our way to becoming physicians.
William "Rocky" Walter is a first year medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School and a member of the Harvard class of 2007.