What it’s like to dissect a cadaver | Hacker News Reader

What it’s like to dissect a cadaver

alok.github.io

208 pointsyuppiemephisto102 comments

This wasn't full on dissection but ... my father was dating a coroner, who really wanted me to go to med school. However, my father was also ridiculously squeamish, to the point where even a few drops of blood could result in a faint. So, she decided to take me to an autopsy she had to sign off on, to see if I was also as delicate. My father refused to even enter the building, but there I am, with my first cadaver, which was a suicide.

Local laws dictated that all bullet fragments be removed, and since it was a low-caliber bullet the man had fired into his head, it mostly bounced around in there. Originally, they had drilled a discreet hole and were trying to get everything out that way, but eventually had to do the full rectangle, with a Stryker autopsy saw.

Suffice to say that I do not have my father's squeamishness.

Random side note but feinting at the sight of blood isn't necessarily a squeamish thing. I remember when we were learning to place IV's and the med student a row over from me warned he would feint. The nurses teaching us tried to re-assure him but he interrupted -- "Oh I'm not squeamish or scared or anything, its just a reaction to blood specifically".

(TY for sharing your story btw, thought the aside was interesting enough to tangent on)

Phlebotomist insisted I look away while she took my blood for testing, I'm pretty certain I would be fine, but I suppose one can't really know short of experience, and she's had enough people gain a bad experience not to want to let anyone gain any!

Surely a med student needs to overcome that though? Even going into say.. radiology, it seems bound to happen from time to time, isn't that just really inconvenient for everyone, embarrassing even for the doctor (by then) himself?

There are specific courses for blood and needle phobias for medical students.

From my understanding they’re mostly exposure therapy. Perhaps also some additional teaching about what be actual (low) risks with exposure are.

Oh, his squeamishness was legendary. Despised horror films or too-graphic war movies. I saw him stop in his tracks, stagger back, and turn white upon seeing a fake dead rat from a Tom Sawyer costume. (And guess who had to bury the family pets?)

Any advice on how to get over that reaction to blood?

Some sort of training I guess. Start with very little exposure then increase quantities.

From what I understand the cause is an automatic response to lower the blood pressure, so as to limit the blood loss.

Perhaps the brain of the "fainter" is mistakenly interpreting the blood as its own (that of its own body)?

Contract some muscle, for example close and contract your hand. That would cause the blood to flow there and increase blood pressure preventing fainting.

Blood phobia psychological treatments developed by behaviourists give that indication to patients during the exposure to blood and blood related experiences during the treatment. The name of the therapy is exposure therapy and it's the one with more evidence supporting it for treating phobias. Yes, its about "facing your fears" but it's done in a gradual way. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exp... Therapists found ways to prevent the fainting during the blood-phobia treatment, allowing the graded exposure occur.

maybe watching the show "dexter" can help? I am weak to some blood stuff, I fainted once just talking about it. However, donating blood or watching dexter was ok.

I was not allowed to donate blood because the nurse noticed I started to look pale before I even got stuck with the needle.

Did she explain why the law was that way? Is it for evidence / forensics in case the case is reopened?

No, she did not. I gather it was a source of occasional irritation.

Did you end up going to med school?!

No. I ended up with a rare metabolic disorder that reacts very poorly with lack of sleep or even skipping meals and, as such, decided the usual hazing rituals associated with med school would be a very poor idea. Ironically, I ended up diagnosing the disorder looong before the M.D.s would consider it and had to twist their collective arms for the tests, so it isn't like I wouldn't have been a good fit in a diagnostic aspect.

Firstly, its surprising that this school allows what would apparently be the lay public gain access to human anatomical gifts. In Canada, this is restricted to persons with a legitimate interest, ie med students and grad students in bioengineering/bio-adjacent fields.

I think that the author is not an individual with such an interest was quite clear from the tone taken on this piece - most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person; for some reason the way this piece was written felt almost disrespectful.

> most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person

Not that I know first-hand, but that's not the impression I got from the med students when I was at uni.

People find all sorts of odd ways to cope with their own mortality, and getting reminded of it tends to bring those to the fore.

Speaking from first-hand, I can't remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a "gift of body" ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.

I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.

Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:

- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery

- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.

- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.

- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."

Also speaking from first hand I remember quite a bit of "disrespect". Jokes were outright common. The vast majority of interactions were respectful of course -- its hard work studying anatomy after all. But TBH many folks in medicine can be quite callous, which I find not unrelated to the task at hand (i.e. dealing with the crazy and brutal facts of us all being mushy living creatures at a much higher rate than most people). Standing in a room full of dead bodies being dissected... isn't really normal. And it takes a toll.

> TBH many folks in medicine can be quite callous

Pretty much. Med school seems to have this sinister ability to destroy part of your humanity.

> Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."

Thought provoking. I'll keep this in mind while holding a hundred billion apples during lunch. ;)

From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands. And there's also something in the brain that has been lost, something beyond mere physical matter. An easy example of this is a puzzle, if you're putting a puzzle together, and I come in and mix it up, I've taken something from you, and yet I took no material object away. There's probably some organization that's part of our brain and "humanity" that is lost at death. I'm not talking about religious "spirit" here - back to the puzzle, it has no spirit, but an assembled puzzle is more than the physical material it is made of.

I don't mean to be super critical of your lab partner, just sharing some additional philosophical views.

> From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands.

I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.

A large amount of computation takes place in the gut, largely by the foreign bacteria that make up our gut flora, and the gut has direct lines of two-way communication with the brain. Hence the term "gut feeling".

The brain certainly does a lot of heavy lifting, but I think if you took a person's brain out of their human body and into a robot body instead, they'd probably have dramatic shifts in personality, behavior, thought processes, feelings, worldview, etc. It would probably be on a similar level as those experiments where people use magnetic or electric pulses on their brain or whatever and observe large personality changes.

The comment you're replying to is talking about discussion of the experience (hopefully after the fact). I don't think that they're claiming the bodies are being disrespectfully handled. I'm assuming they're talking about the black humor people use to cope with being surrounded by illness and death.

Mom's a nurse, so it never struck me as odd or mean-spirited. It finally dawned on me when she cracked a joke in response to a question grandma asked about a work story mom was telling at a family get-together. It went over grandma's head, thankfully. It was a pretty good pun, but I think that was the first time I realized that not everyone is used to that sort of talk.

First-hand, every session that involved cadavers during medical school was very respectful. We were told not to take photos as well. Worst part was the smell of formalin. Humour is fine, assuming the person/cadaver would have been okay with it (and quite a few of the older patients I've met joke about their mortality). But I would rather be respectful and play it safe.

Yes — the smell of the formalin!

In 1970-71, my first year at UCLA med school, we spent four (4) hours 4 (four) days a week in the gross anatomy lab.

First semester was below the neck, second semester just the head and neck.

Fascinating; I enjoyed everything about dissecting our (4 students/body) corpse.

The only bad thing was the smell of the formalin: it was SO strong that my eyes would water every session: they/I never got used to it.

My "Grant's Anatomy" textbook, which was propped up on the cadaver tank every session to guide me, still stunk of formalin 40+ years later, so much so that much as I enjoyed having it as a memory of something I did that was really hard, I threw it away around 2010 because it made every closet or cabinet or drawer I put it in reek.

I suspect ventilation in the dissection room (120 students/30 cadavers) 52 years ago was WAY worse than it is today.

I'm surprised I'm not brain dead from inhaling superstrong formalin vapor 16 hours/week x 16 weeks/semester x 2 semesters = for roughly 500 hours that year.

Maybe I am brain dead!

> Worst part was the smell of formalin.

You should eat Serrano ham sandwich afterwards, that just about cures it /s

The formalin smell and hunger are such a weird trip in the lab. Good lunch before was key in my opinion.

Does very respectful mean no dark humor?

My experience was that boisterous shenanigans, like juggling testicles or something, would absolutely not have been tolerated. Indeed, the mood was somber/business-like enough that no one even dared. On the other hand, a whispered inoffensive remark to your lab partner would be okay. Something this like this would probably be okay:

-- "Be careful not to nick the nerve as you <whatever>"

-- "Opps! Better now?

-- "Yes. In fairness, it's not her biggest problem right now"

Others demanding a "respectful" treatment, usually mean, that handling, diposal and research on remains, should be treated by a seperate group of persons. One which they usually shun socially, should they ever talk about or discuss there work or parts of it. So the respectful treatment, is actually code for "I do not want to talk about that, or engage with that, unless i must."

Meanwhile, pathology is such a interesting science. Especially the quite visual signs of self inflicted decay due to substance abuse or bad living conditions are very hands on. Also the realization, that the body is a self deprecating machine, adapting to all circumstances.

Great german book on famous dead people and the source of there demise: https://www.amazon.de/Woran-sie-wirklich-starben-Pers%C3%B6n...

My brother, when he attended his anatomy classes, told me the med students were very playful and joked all the time. A coping mechanism, perhaps? I think it's understandable, but respectful they were not.

For example, they called one of the corpses "blondie"... and she was headless. Let that one sink in.

Respect to the cadaver was teached in our first dissection class and not even once any incident like that happened. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of disrespect coming from veterinary students, which brought me some disgust.

What other inanimate objects (that can’t kill us easily, like an industrial press or firearm) do we talk about “respect” for?

I think this is a special case of emotional transference.

I don’t personally see a reason to treat cadavers any differently than any other object in a lab. They’re not people. Do we need to be careful to show respect for our mobile phones? How about our coffee mugs?

> I don’t personally see a reason to treat cadavers any differently than any other object in a lab

Even from a purely consequentialist point of view: if behavior around the cadavers gets out to the public, and the public deems it disrespectful, the public stops donating cadavers, which negatively impacts medical education. Even if you don't personally believe in treating human remains with respect, a huge part of society does, and you have to at least respect that.

Interesting that the stories about disrespectful behavior are always a friend of a friend and not the medical students themselves. I suspect a majority of these second hand stories of casual disrespect are a combination of a game of telephone and unreliable narrative bluster from young medical students confronting their own mortality for possibly the first time in their lives. Every story from someone with direct experience seems to be respectful.

No. This is first hand experience by my brother during anatomy classes. He was a student and one of the jokers, too. He said this behavior was pretty common, and he took part in it.

Disrespectful/joking behavior behind the scenes is not too rare with doctors, either. I have doctor friends who attest to this, as in, they engage in this behavior (so again, no game of telephone here). Never in front of the patient, since that would be rude and unacceptable, but privately with other physicians? You bet.

You get that this is exactly the scenario I just described, right?

No, how? To you maybe it is (as would ANY anecdote here not directly related by an anatomy student -- and maybe not even then, because what proof do you have that they are telling the truth?), but to me it's not: I spoke with the student directly, and with the doctors in my second example; in both cases, the person I was talking to was directly engaged in the behavior. So not "a friend of a friend".

You are justified in being skeptical, but unfortunately you're not going to find the evidence you seek on HN. By definition, the written word here is not going to be proof enough. If the topic interests you enough, I guess you'll have to speak to doctors and students directly?

I had overheard some dentists joking recently, that was so discussing than even proctologists couldn't say such jokes.

I went to medical school. I saw this firsthand many times. It's neither unexpected nor surprising. You are dissecting dead bodies, in a giant room full of dead bodies and you are there for months.

EDIT: I realize I should clarify based on some of the sibling comments... nobody was doing anything obscene with body parts. I'm referring to commentary, jokes, dark humor.

> nobody was doing anything obscene with body parts

Yes, same with my anecdotes. I was talking about dark humor, not doing anything obscene with body parts. I think nobody else mentioned anything obscene, either.

I participated in a dissection (ex med tech in the Canadian Forces) and the impression that I got is that the room was filled with respect, with everyone being careful to keep the dignity of the cadavers intact at all time.

If you want to listen to the dark/shady side of the body broker business check out this swindled podcast. These dudes were chopping up bodies and storing parts in buckets, warm coolers, you name it.

It’s quite a listen!

https://swindledpodcast.com/podcast/84-the-body-broker/

Many medical students have their cadaver stories that have similar intrusive thoughts.

Some of those thoughts were shared out loud and definitely come off as ignorant due to the curiosity of the writer.

There's a book I read recently "When Breath Becomes Air" that talks about this rite of passage and the "respect" for mortality that isn't always shared by first year med students.

Many universities, at least in Europe, allow you to sign up to individual modules/exams. This is usually used by people who want to get ahead and study stuff before they actually sign up to a degree, but anyone can do it. At that point, the author would have been a student of that class like any other.

In what way is the OP's interest in dissecting cadavers not "legitimate"?

They don't seem to be doing this to pursue anything other than personal curiosity. And fairly light-hearted curiosity at that -- the tone of the article, to me, sounds more like, "Ooh, nerves are neat!" than someone trying to build a body of knowledge for a larger purpose.

I'm not going to go so far to say that only med students should have access to cadavers... but this article does feel like a rando just cutting someone up for fun, and that feels a bit off to me.

It's funny how differently people can read things, and how different contexts color our impressions.

On most topics, this community mostly values pursuing personal curiosity even if it's not for a larger purpose. We never know where we will find larger purposes, after all! And following interest and desire is generally a valued habit.

I didn't get the impression they were a rando "cutting someone up for fun" (note "someone"). I did get the impression they were a rando who wanted to know more about the human body, with a particular interest in the nervous system likely from a career in AI/ML. Note how the author has a better appreciation for the effects of disease, for the effects of exercise, and how they had intuitional leaps around brain structure and its applicability to ML as well as nascent intuition around the importance of social systems to evolution.

Personally I'm really glad that these opportunities exist. Most bodies become ash or sit rotting unnaturally slowly. This is a better use, even for lay people with idle curiosity.

I had the same impression from the article, and I'm glad you brought up the value of pursuing personal curiosity.

This brings up a central question about the value of collective vs individual knowledge. If you donated your body, would you rather help a lot of people a little or a few people a lot?

If I knew that my body had the power to bring about a truly humbling, enriching, and perspective changing experience to a few individuals, I would be happy with that. In an indirect way, it might be so inspiring for those individuals as to result in a net gain of collective knowledge in the future.

When you say it now I see what you mean, but when first reading the article I read of it more as awe and the act of understanding humanity on a deeper level - a physical level of course, but also transcendent somehow. I don't know if that makes sense... When I look back at it having read your comment, I also doubt my initial more generous view of the situation.

The person being cut up is not hurt, they gave their consent to be cut up. So why should third parties intervene? Of course if there is a shortage of dead bodies, medical students should be prioritized, but why not also open it to everyone. In fact, it is better IMO to have this regulated by universities as those will help with maximizing the learning, and ensure it happens in a respecting environment.

"I’ve even taken a date there, and she enjoyed it!"

So is the illegitimate part the fact that they brought a date, or the fact that she enjoyed it?

If you brought a date to a makerspace, would that make your interest in the makerspace illegitimate? Only if she enjoys it?

Yeah, it's stuff like this that makes me not want to donate my body to science.

I totally understand how you feel, but I think I disagree. After I'm dead, my body is of no use to me. I'm gone. Like Elvis, I will have "left the building". I'm not an ancient Egyptian and so I neither believe in the afterlife nor in my body being of use to me there. And bodies are definitely a boon to science and medicine; they help the living! What can be more uplifting than that?

However, if the body of a loved one who has passed away were to be treated without respect, it would upset me a lot.

So interesting, because I had the opposite response. Sure if I donate my body to "science" and it's critical in some sort of medical discovery that would be great, but reading the OP and seeing the author's fascination, learning, and engagement with the cadaver I thought, "Gosh, what a gift!"

I'd certainly be very happy knowing that my body brought such an experience to another individual, I certainly won't be using my body anymore at that point.

I wonder if, when signing up for donation, you can specify what kinds of "science" or interactions you prefer your body to be used for after dying.

Well don't donate your body to France [1]. Some witness even alleged the medical team played football with people heads.

[1] https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/french-academic-charged-over-mas...

My sister (a doctor) told us of a few rather unsavory incidents that happened with body parts during her time at medical school.

Its pretty common tbh.

Yikes! I hope that was a corner, nee coroner, case, but it would not surprise me. My mother was a student nurse in the 40's. In the U.S. for context. She told me of corpses floating in a big tub, or vat, at uni, and that they had to take them out and dissect them for class. She didn't mention any peculiar schenanigans as you describe and I am glad she did not.

shenanigans (no "c").

Good catch. Thank you.

I'm on the list to donate my body. Perhaps a medical student will gain just a little more insight or skill by practicing a technique on my body, and perhaps that will help them save or help a patient or two in the future. I hope so.

The thornier issue, having discussed my wishes with my family, is how it will affect them after I go.

Or maybe you’ll be blown up by the us military :)

Exactly. I always understood you could allow your remains to be used for organ donation or for science. Not for some entertainment before Friday drinks. May be no worse than the way some med students treat donated bodies, but that doesn't make it any better.

Interesting. I did not take the author’s tone in a disrespectful way. It wasn’t solemn, but it wasn’t flippant. It appeared they had a genuine desire to learn about the body. That seems just as noble as a med student who isn’t really interested in medicine beyond a job that makes money and their parents happy.

If this sort of thing interests you and you're in the UK, there's a show in the next couple of weeks called My Dead Body where a woman narrates her own dissection (through recordings and ML-based voice recreation): https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4-announces-movi... .. apparently the woman was the first (identifiable) person in the UK to donate their body for "public display".

Two observations I've heard from a young relative who has done cadaver dissection at scale, and is qualified to teach the subject in Med. School:

- "You want a facility with good ventilation. Doesn't take an M.D. to understand that breathing the vapors from embalming fluids, intestine contents, etc. is bad."

- "Once you get the head off, the rest is easy."

Hands are also very weird. Our brain identifies with our faces and hands.

Honestly, from my experiences in medical school, cadavers smell strongly like formaldehyde, and all the tissues are brown, atrophied, and hard to distinguish. I remember realizing my understanding of anatomy (at least abdominal) increased way more from watching surgery on healthy tissue than an entire year of clinical anatomy courses...

This sort of topic does not interest me, but I clicked, and to my surprise I gulped the article. This is one of the most interesting posts I've read on HN, ever. Awesome writeup, I love the POV of a non-expert in the field!

I've been in medical schools where there were corpses and students all over the large hall. My first thought was wow each of these people had dreams, personalities and a soul. They were somebody. It gave me some comfort that the students were taught to respect the bodies and treat them with dignity. I wonder if that's all medical school or only this one because it was catholic.

It seems OP doesn't care about this?

Anyway, that's when I realized I could never be in that profession. I would have to become cold to it and I probably couldn't.

A soul?! Reminds me of Queen's "Fun It":

>"Hey, everybody, everybody gonna have a good time tonight

Just shakin' the soles of your feet

Everybody, everybody gonna have a good time tonight

That's the only soul you'll ever meet..."<

https://www.letras.com/queen/86774/

A soul is just a word for an individual human consciousness.

Yeah, just as with aspirin, I carry a few of those (i.e.,"souls") in my pocket for emergencies, e.g., in case I need to fend off Satan (an archaic term for an individual evil entity of great power) - I toss a fee on the sidewalk and skedaddle away while He (i.e., the Devil [caps for classicly-attributed respect of his overweening spiritual powers]) devours them.

I think you're making a philosophical error akin to denying the existence of bread on the basis of not believing in transubstantiation. The word "soul" has a lot of unprovable beliefs attached to it in every world religion, but the word on its own refers to that which experiences in all the uses I'm aware of.

I tip my fedora to you kind gentlesir.

> It seems OP doesn't care about this?

Where in the post did you see a lack of dignity? To me, it didn't seem disrespectful.

> If you exercise, we’ll know. Their insides just look different.

I've seen some video footage of minimally invasive operations (during a dies academicus lecture) and OMG fat was just so ugly. I know it is a natural part of us but when I saw that footage I promised myself to do more sports.

Or IDK what they were referring to.

Probably muscle mass and connective tissue, too.

My late wife was a physical therapist and in undergrad she had a gross anatomy class with a cadaver dissection. After the chest cavity was opened, they were supposed to go over the internal organs step by step, but her group instead found a plastic bag inside containing all of the organs. Apparently the autopsy had involved inspecting, weighing, etc. the organs which made for a somewhat confusing discovery once the class got in there.

On a related note, I would like to strongly recommend Jacob Geller's YouTube essay "What's the Point of Taking Apart a Body" [0]. It uses video games for the main examples, but goes quite deep in multiple directions in search of deeper meaning. I found it to be very poignant.

[0] https://youtu.be/ohco3PB6eBw

For once an article I'm happy doesn't have pictures.

I got to experience a cadaver lab when my wife was taking a gross anatomy course. By the time I visited they were pretty deep into the semester, so the bodies were pretty well cut up.

I only saw people being respectful the two times I was there, after hours with only students and no professors around.

The smell was terrible, not because of rotting flesh, but because the chemicals. I had more opportunities to visit, but couldn't really get over the smell so would just wait in the hall for my wife.

I'm optimistic that I don't experience that many dead bodies again until I am one.

Contemplating human innards makes me queasy PDQ. Somewhat relatedly, I unreservedly reject tattoos as a desecration of the gift of nature.

That all being said, I agree, this essay was well-written and appropriately respectful. Thank you for posting !

I spent three days in a cadaver lab with two severed heads. I was helping develop a tool to place a wound dressing in the sinuses after an ethmoidectomy. For most of the time we had cloth draped over most of the head except the nose, but I did end up seeing the severed neck and the faces. You really can’t unsee that.

The facility we used also did animal experiments, which I really don’t want to know about, but there was an amazing photocopied chart taped up in the locker room with diagrams of how to put notches in mouse ears in order to encode numbers on them.

Great article. Some of my thoughts and experiences:

-- most medical school cadavers look like jerky and smell weird -- most medical schools (in the UK at least) do not like students doing dissection; they prefer prosection (where someone competent has already made the cut) -- it was, for me, an increasingly weird feeling to realise that the images seen on medical imaging -- particularly axial (cross-sectional) t2 weighted MRI images, really really do look like reality, but with the colours in grey and white rather than odd shades of red, white and pink -- nobody feels emotional about a liver -- everybody feels emotional about hands, and doesn't expect to when they go in -- for actually understanding the Latin names of everything and the typical decorative layout of the human body, VR or just plain medical imaging are pretty damn good, arguably better than aforesaid interestingly smelling jerky -- for actually understanding that your future career will involve dealing with people's children or possibly parents in dire situations, that we are all naked under our clothes (and should just get over it as a society), and that, yes, we are all going to die, the dissection room can't be beat.

Gunther von Hagens has 4 great anatomical videos with dissection called Anatomy for Beginners, it aired on Channel 4 years ago, if you mostly want explanations here's great channel as well https://www.youtube.com/c/InstituteofHumanAnatomy/

I took a cadaver lab as part of a functional biomechanics class during grad school. It was focused around, well, biomechanics -- how the body moves, how joints work, the mechanisms behind various injuries, that kind of thing. It was cross-listed between the engineering department and med school, so there were a good mix of people there. It was also only one component in an _extremely_ intensive course (I think we averaged something like 9-10hrs/week total on just that single course), but still IIRC (this was 2012ish) we spent around 1.5hrs with the cadaver every week for the whole semester. I also worked for a little while as an EMT, so I've dealt with patients while they're still alive, and I've done some (though just a little) work on the theoretical side of things, doing some research into various prostheses, osseointegration, and so forth, as part of my grad school coursework, plus some simulation work -- FEA, muscle activation models, that kind of things. It was very much a breadth search, and (for lack of a better word) I "enjoyed" every minute of it. Or maybe "rewarding" would be better here, I don't know. At least for me, it was a very unique headspace -- though one that I ultimately left, for reasons that aren't relevant here.

I think it's okay to find the biological systems behind your own body fascinating, even to the point of excitement. There's a very good talk by John Cleese about the difference between seriousness and solemnity, and I see some very strong parallels here. It's also worth mentioning that western attitudes towards death are both historically a very new thing and also, well, weird. If you grew up in the west, it's likely all you're used to, but these days we live in a world that has dramatically less death in it than even 50 years prior. I mean, entire industries have sprung up around this almost... deification, this sanctification of death. And to be perfectly honest, I think it's unhealthy to think of something so deeply integral to the natural world as something to be so shy about. But perspective is always important to have; for me, I think often about the idea of death. To really internalize what it means, that this thing was once moving and breathing and thinking, with a rich inner existence, just like me. And yet I have a (sometimes extremely) dark sense of humor. Comes with the territory, I think.

In the last day of our cadaver lab, we had some extra time, and we basically had, well, free reign. To be clear, at that point, the cadaver was in pretty rough shape. Turns out that pretty much everywhere on the body has muscle, bone, and connective tissue -- the exact things you're interested in from a biomechanics perspective. So pretty much the only two things left were inside the thoracic cavity, or the brain. There were other cadavers we could look at (but not dissect), so pretty much any of the end states we could just walk a few meters away and see. But looking at a diseased lung from an already-dissected cadaver still isn't the same as opening up the chest cavity yourself, so that's what we did. And it was deeply fascinating, even though it wasn't directly relevant to the class. That sense of... excited fascination... is something I can really relate to in the OP's article. I think that's okay, maybe even healthy, and I can imagine it being a powerful driver for people who decide to do, for example, biomechanics research. But again, perspective is important -- don't forget that you're standing there, dissecting, and the cadaver, well, can't do that anymore. So while I can absolutely emphasize with the fascination of it, the discovery of it...

...never in a million years would I consider bringing a _date_ to a cadaver lab.

If anyone wants to get their head around anatomy, beautifully prepared, find ‘Ackland’s Anatomy’. It’s the visual bible. Beautifully prepared dissections from start to finish.

It’s also much cleaner than the particularly tedious process of dissecting a entire human being, most of which consists of slowly stripping back skin and fat to get to the interesting stuff (Source: with 2 others, slowly dismantled an entire adult human male from whole body down to each individual muscle and tendon over a period of 4 months)

Two amazing BBC documentaries, although not currently available:

The Incredible Human Hand: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2md

The Incredible Human Foot: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2rj

This is listed as being shown in 2020, however I watched 2017 or so, perhaps it has been updated.

In college I got to spend a day at a cadaver lab, where the pre-meds taking that class acted as tour guides. It was one of the more meaningful experiences of my education such that I feel everyone should have the opportunity. I learned more about mammalian anatomy in that single experience than from any of the biology labs in which I'd been a student.

There is an excellent chapter in Ghost in The Throat[1] that answers this question in a somewhat more poetical fashion.

[1] https://tramppress.com/product/a-ghost-in-the-throat-by-doir...

Michael Crichton opens his book Travels with a pretty detailed description of dissecting the head of a cadaver.

> No wonder our feet have so many problems: they were once hands

Isn't this backwards? Or am I mistaken about human evolution? My understand was that our ancestors were not arboreal and walked on all fours then we adapted to walking upright. Therefore, feet became hands.

That is some overt bipedalism there :)

Many (most?) monkeys like chimpanzees have opposable thumbs on their “feet” so they’re more like a second pair of hands, which get exercised as such by gripping tree branches. Humans, on the other hand, keep their bottom hands in rigid clothing so they never get any real exercise.

> Corpses are ridiculously stiff. I couldn’t turn an arm over without risking snapping the wrist.

Mary Roach has written a great book book with the same name about the same subject.

With all due respect to the profession, but.. how does this kind of thing arrived to the front page with 5 points? HN, come on, really?

I've seen a fair number of posts arriving to the front page with ~5 points.

One element could be the timing - if 5 points appear in the first, say, 15 minutes, it might be enough to raise it to the front page? Maybe there's an element of randomness, too. Dunno.

I suppose HN algorithms are secret for a reason - if they were revealed, they could be optimized for.

The HN algorithm picks posts from the new pool and puts them on the front page for a short time to see if it gets traction. This has been explained somewhere but I don't have the link.

It seems that the link was placed in the second-chance pool by a moderator: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

What's the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

A lot of articles pop onto the front page after just 5–7 votes. I think it has something to do with the upvoters not being correlated and the votes all coming quickly together.

But then it needs more votes in a short window to stay. If it doesn't get them, it drops off as quickly as it came.

So this seems to be HN working as usual.

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