Junior doctor reveals a shocking truth about dissecting bodies

It's a rite of passage for medical students.

It’s probably comforting to know that, before medical students are let loose on live patients, they spend time learning about the human body by dissecting cadavers.

Cadavers are the bodies of people who kindly donate them to science, helping ensure the next generation of doctors can get to grips with injections, anatomy and surgery.

Second-party consent once allowed relatives to donate bodies – perhaps saving on costs, doing their bit for the NHS or avoiding an awkward funeral for that unpopular uncle – but since 2004 it must be the individual who makes the decision.

Twenty years on this has contributed to a cadaver shortage, with the difference being made up by imports from the US, where regulations are more relaxed.

But despite the drop in numbers, dissecting a cadaver remains a rite of passage for those training to be doctors – and comes with one very surprising side effect.

Junior doctor Tharanika Ahillan shared the revelation while reflecting on the range of emotions and revelations that come with learning about the human body from a very real one.

‘At medical school, as part of our anatomy teaching in first and second year, we had dissection classes,’ she says. ‘There are about 10 bodies around, with about seven or eight students for each body.

‘Each group has an anatomy demonstrator who takes us through the main anatomical structures to learn, and we each take it in turns to dissect and talk through the structures.

‘It was an incredibly strange experience at first. Before you go in for the first time they talk about the laws involved with this – for instance it’s illegal to take bits of tissue outside of the laboratory, not that anyone ever would – and handling the bodies with respect for the people who donated them.

‘The first session was strange, but it’s quite hard to explain. Once you start dissecting however, you become quite ‘clinical’, working through your aims for the session and dissecting carefully and logistically. 

‘I suppose in some ways it’s how you need to detach yourself sometimes in medicine to deliver what you need to the patient, whether that’s surgery or life-saving treatment.’

Watch any drama or film with med students meeting their cadavers, and there’s a good chance there’ll be someone fainting at the sight – and that happens in real life, with students often passing out during the class.

However, almost all students who attend dissection classes suffer another, very unexpected reaction.

‘What no one ever tells you before you go in is that you get really hungry!’ says Dr Ahillan.

‘The bodies are sprayed in formaldehyde to preserve them, but the formaldehyde apparently stimulates your appetite, and makes you hungry – a phenomenon literally called “formaldehyde hunger”.

‘I found it disturbing at first. It sounded really bad when I would meet friends for lunch and say ‘I am STARVING’ just after I’d cut open a dead person.’

Dr Ahillan says the hunger soon spread its way around the class and worked its way into their work.

‘You could tell when it was affecting us when our comparisons in the dissection gradually got more food-themed, such as “cutting through this skin feels like cutting through an apple core”,’ she says. 

‘It was particularly in the sessions when our dissections were before lunch. Psychologically it feels really weird when you’re getting really ravenous when you’re cutting open bodies, it’s a really strange juxtaposition. 

‘At first I didn’t dare ask if anyone else was hungry in the anatomy lab but when everyone shared how they felt it was a bit of a relief to hear too, because let’s face it, the phenomenon does mess with your head.’ 

Reflecting on the hardest part of the class, apart from ignoring the hunger, Dr Ahillan said she found hands the trickiest element.

‘I think hands are really quite intrinsically human, so it felt uncomfortable dissecting them to learn about the muscles and nerves within them,’ she says.

‘Even now that sticks with me, and I sometimes find that when patients are in incredible amounts of distress, taking their hand can be such a human way of comforting them.

‘The other thing that I found particularly hard was holding a human brain for the first time. It was holding in my hand this essence of a person, all their thoughts and feelings, had originated from this three-pound structure. I actually found it quite emotional to be honest.’

And if the idea of holding a whole human brain isn’t making you feel queasy, this might.

‘There was one lesson where we were looking at the lungs of someone,’ says Dr Ahillan. ‘It was covered in tar and was quite grey. The demonstrator asked us all why we thought that was the case, and we said “maybe they were a smoker”.

‘It turned out that the individual actually had just lived in London all their life, and it was the result of air pollution. 

‘It definitely made me think much more about how the environment has an impact on health!’