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Asked by anon-255030 to Tim, Richard, Reka on 19 May 2020.
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Richard Burns answered on 19 May 2020:
In my work we look at MRI scans of the heart, so I just look at pictures made into 3D. I haven’t actually held a heart since I was in highschool biology but yes it was very gross and that’s why I do computational biology and very rarely anything physical.
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Comments
Craig commented on :
Hi Immy! I’m an anatomist, which means that as part of my job, we dissect both humans and animals. Essentially, we cut people open, look at and remove their organs. We think of this as an important way to understand the way the body works and an essential way to teach doctors, dentists and scientists what goes wrong and how to fix it.
Understandably, this is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable either for personal, social or religious reasons. Anatomists spend lots of time thinking about this and thinking about ways we can do our jobs either without cutting donors open, or by looking for ways to minimise this. Methods such as virtual reality, imaging, models or animal dissections are used, but something that is overwhelmingly clear is that human dissection is one of the best way to get a good feeling of the anatomy of the human body.
Imagine being a surgeon, but only ever having seen the heart as a plastic model or in a textbook – you’re gonna really want to see what a human heart is like in 3D before cutting into a living one! For this reason, we’re MASSIVELY grateful to the kind people that decide to donate their bodies to us so that we can both learn and teach anatomy. It’s an incredible gift and something that we never take for granted.
A way I think about it is that donating a heart will save the unbelievably lucky patient that receives that heart. However, donating a body to anatomy helps train up to 15 medical students, each of which will go on to save countless lives – the numbers can be up in the hundreds of thousands… Besides that, scientists can learn about disease using these donors and can go on to find treatments and can save many, many people!
While some find it gross looking at a heart, or seeing blood, I think of myself as lucky to have the privilege to be in a position that so few people find themselves in.
Alex commented on :
I don’t work with body parts anymore, but when I was in my undergraduate degree I used to have lessons in the dissection room – I even had an entire exam looking at real life brains and answering questions on them!!
I personally am really squeamish and not good with blood or body parts, so these lessons were a real mixture of fascination and interest seeing how the body works and all the different pieces that make it up, respect for the person that had donated their body for us to study it and awe for the fact all these organs and pieces kept someone alive for years and years and there they are in my hand or on the table in front of me, and then also a part of my brain essentially screaming “I Do Not Like This” and “Body Parts Should Be On The Inside”. Every lesson we’d have at least one person faint – the one time it was me was when we were looking at the reproductive system.
Luckily when you’re in these situations you’re wearing gloves and gowns and occasionally googles so there’s no chance of getting anything on yourself, and there were demonstrators with us that knew how to handle fainting.
anon-255030 commented on :
wow that’s really interesting thank you!!
Alena commented on :
Immy, I am not squeamish at all. Even when I was in school and we were dissecting hearts and other organs I was quite happy to do that, because I appreciated that insight it gave me into finding out how it looks inside and from that deduce how it works.