[truculation]

Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).

For those of us who don't have to, I recommend:

https://www.zygotebody.com/

[arkades]

I had no especial antipathy to the cadaver lab in med school. A preserved cadaver holds very little relationship to a real body, outside of the relationships of anatomical landmarks. I -wish- we had had been able to study from prosections.

But digital cadavers completely fail to capture the three dimensional relationship of the components of a body. I have probably every atlas on the market, paper and digital, and I still occasionally go to our affiliated school’s lab to interrogate a body when I need a refresher.

There is nothing even vaguely approaching a replacement yet, though I’ve been hearing about how we can replace real dissections with simulations for literally decades. I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.

[ianai]

This does seem counterproductive to me as well. I very much scare away from the idea of learning from cadavers myself. But that makes me all the more appreciative of the people who do. If it weren’t for modern medicine I would be crippled or dead. The benefits heavily outweigh the costs.

[truculation]

>I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.

I'm not recommending we end the use of cadavers -- and this is a discussion site, not a medical school!

[digi_owl]

Would 3D glasses help? Or is the issue how to deal with the mass of the various layers and organs?

[wafflebear]

It would be like learning origami without ever folding a sheet of paper.

[trhway]

How about 3d printed bodies?

[ben_w]

My gut (non expert) feeling is that when 3D printing can be indistinguishable from natural, and quality assurance can make it reliably indistinguishable, we won’t need humans digging around inside us.

How long that takes I would only embarrass myself by guessing.

[tickerticker]

A benefit of cadaver disection is the range of anomalies like the penile implant, or finding hair and teeth in a random abdominal nook. Tough to imagine this benefit in 3D printed versions.

[thomasfedb]

There's something about laying hands on flesh that's important. As a medical student at a school that does not practice dissection, I feel envious of my grandfather who learnt his anatomy using a scalpel. We have labs with prosected cadavers, but that leaves much to be wanted.

[facetube]

Real place, real thing. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu

[5DFractalTetris]

The experience of the cadaver laboratory turned me away from the medical school. It is the most unpleasant place I have ever been.

[matheusmoreira]

This technology is insufficiently advanced and does not substitute dead bodies. In fact, I used these digital bodies when I took anatomy and it wasn't enough. Drawn atlases and physical models just weren't real enough for me. Gray's absurdly detailed textual descriptions of the human body only helped me understand things better after I had already memorized the anatomy being discussed.

The best way to learn, at least for me, was in practice. During the year that I took anatomy, I would go to the laboratory almost every single day and spend all day there going over the structures of the human body over a hundred times. I needed to physically manipulate the pieces in order to understand them.