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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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