Not the world’s liveliest date: “Everyone is a bit nervous the first time they meet their cadavers,” says Dr. Melanie McCollum.
This semester, 140 first-year medical students and a handful of graduate students enrolled in Dr. Melanie McCollum’s “Gross Anatomy” course and lab at UVA. Gross Anatomy is a requisite course for students in the School of Medicine. But many students earn much more than the required credits—lessons in anatomy, dissection, and a chance to meet that certain, special “some body.”
“Everyone is a bit nervous the first time they meet their cadavers,” says McCollum, who admits that students have fainted in the lab. Cadavers are provided by the Richmond Medical Examiner’s Office, and are cremated at the end of each semester before the remains are returned to their families or interred in a plot reserved by the UVA School of Medicine. The course provides one cadaver for every five students, at an average of 30 bodies per semester. The anatomy course’s website lists a team of 12 instructors that split and share lectures and lab sessions on the thorax, the back and upper limbs, and the head and neck, to name a few.
Gross Anatomy has seen a significant overhaul in the past few years, with course hours sliced in half, to only 12 weeks.
“This is a blistering pace,” says McCollum. However, she adds that most students come to the lab more than the required six-to-10 supervised hours per week, to ensure that their learning experience is more than skin deep.