Volume 27 · Number 1 · Fall 2009
Campus Views
By Emily Dubina ’09
Nothing Like the Real Thing
Human anatomy lessons go more than skin deep, thanks to donors who give of themselves in a most literal sense.
The first time I walked through the double doors of 1262 Haring into undergraduate “Human Gross Anatomy Lab 101L,” my senses went into overdrive. Students gathered around stainless steel gurneys, chatting anxiously as they waited for class to start. Full skeletons stood like guards at each of four stations. Glass-windowed cabinets held a strange assortment of models: giant inner ears with twisting and turning canals, hips showing the muscles of the pelvic floor, knees revealing their ligaments. And of course, there was the smell — an unforgettable mixture of formaldehyde and Downey used to preserve and soften tissue — that confirmed what I already knew. This class relied on more than models and diagrams to teach about the human body.
It was winter quarter 2008, and I was a third-year exercise biology major eager to learn human anatomy. We started that first lab looking at the spine and shoulder girdle. I was doing just fine looking at the skeletons, models and bones, but then one of our teaching assistants pulled out the first prosection, part of a cadaver that has been professionally dissected to demonstrate particular anatomic structures.
Despite my experience volunteering in hospitals and watching somewhat gruesome medical procedures, seeing that human shoulder made the room spin and my ears ring. I broke out in a cold sweat. Sitting there with my head cradled in my hands between my knees, I thought I was going to have to . . . switch majors. I did not believe there was any way I could complete this class, and it was required for me to graduate.
I dreaded going to the next lab but I made myself go, and an interesting thing happened. Instead of seeing the prosections as shocking and somehow indecent, this time I was intrigued by the stories they could tell. I could not wait to go to the lab every Monday and Wednesday, and to open lab and office hours on Fridays and Saturdays. I looked forward to sitting down with the prosections, looking for the structures we were studying, and seeing what they could teach me.
I ate, slept and breathed anatomy that quarter. When I handed in my last Scantron after the final lab practical, I felt a sudden emptiness. Of the many classes I took while an undergraduate student at UC Davis, this was by far the best.
As Douglas Gross, the instructor for the undergraduate anatomy course, puts it, “It’s hard for me to imagine that students can understand the entire way that our bodies work without knowing how they’re structurally put together.” He not only believes that all science students should take human anatomy as a part of their basic science curriculum, but that the general public should have a basic knowledge of human anatomy as well.
Jenny Plasse, the head associate instructor and course coordinator, believes so much in the value of the course that she plans to eventually donate her own body to science: “I would love to be a skeleton in this anatomy lab.”
I was so hooked on the class that I applied for a position as one of 40 volunteer teaching assistants for winter quarter 2009, helping the nine lab instructors with their sections of 50 students each. I spent countless hours in the lab that session. Sometimes I was there with hundreds of students during open lab; other times, it was just me and the racks of prosections sitting on shelves. Teaching anatomy to other students put a whole new spin on the subject matter. I began to comprehend ideas and concepts that I had barely scratched the surface of the previous year.
As the quarter drew to a close, I came to realize that my greater understanding of the material was only one of the perks. What really mattered was that the students I helped were walking away from the class with a new appreciation and respect for their bodies, as well as for the bodies of the donors who made the class possible. Once living, breathing human beings, these donors made it their final wish to contribute their bodies to science. It was an extraordinary gift, and I am thankful I had the opportunity to learn the stories their bodies had to tell.