Before they die, people are able to leave their bodies to the medical profession in a variety of ways. Some people join the Organ Donation Register, so that their healthy organs can be re-used to give the sick a better quality of life. Others, particularly people who suffer from certain medical conditions, leave their remains for scientific research which looks at those conditions and investigates treatments.
There is also a third category which tends to receive less attention than the others, but which is still just as beneficial to society: leaving your body to a medical school, so that it can be used as a dissection specimen by medical students.
Why would someone leave their body for dissection?
Dissection is actually one of the oldest known medical techniques: using cadavers to broaden our knowledge of how the human body works goes all the way back to the physicians of Ancient Greece (who frequently used the bodies of executed criminals as a source of supply).
Nowadays, dissection is still used in medical schools to teach doctors and surgeons at the beginning of their careers vital lessons in anatomy. Arguably, it may also help to foster a sense of compassion in these students for their future patients, as they get to see the destructive effects of various conditions on the human body from looking at specimens.
Everyone who donates their body for dissection does so for their own reasons. These are a few possible ones:
– To save their relatives the financial and emotional costs of providing a funeral
– To help further medical knowledge
– They may not want to cause their friends and relatives the distress of attending a funeral
– If they feel that it would be hypocritical to have a church funeral service when they weren’t a churchgoer themselves
How does the process work?
Very simply, people who wish to donate their body get in contact with the medical school with which they want to leave it and sign the necessary consent forms. A note is then usually made in their will, meaning it becomes a legal commitment for their executors to hand the body over after they’ve died.
Bodies are usually embalmed using much stronger preservatives than would be the case with a normal funeral, as the remains often have to be kept for up to 18 months, or until the next teaching year begins.
Unfortunately, some bodies have to be rejected once they’ve reached embalming stage – at which point the remains will be returned to the person’s family – either because they had a medical condition which makes it impossible for them to be embalmed, or if their remains are judged to be safety risk to people working with the body (some types of infection can still be transmitted post-mortem).
What about the funeral service?
Families are free to do whatever they like to remember the deceased if they donated their remains to be dissected, except obviously it can’t involve the body. Some people may feel it is fitting to still hold a memorial service or a wake, although it all depends on the family in question.
Different medical schools do different things to commemorate the generosity of the people who’ve donated their bodies. The University of Cambridge has a particularly sympathetic system. There, medical students work in groups of five or six to one body during their studies, and then at the end of the academic year the colleges hold a memorial service for their donors where the idea is to educate the students about the person they’ve been working on. Families are invited to send flowers and photographs, while the students are encouraged to compose tributes to their donors.
Following this service, the bodies are then cremated and the remains are returned to the families of the donors if they request them. Joint memorial services are then usually held by the colleges for all their donors, which family members are welcome to attend.
To read more about the Cambridge University system of dealing with donated bodies, follow this link to read an article from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/16/donate-body-to-medical-science?newsfeed=true
