Would you mind if your doctor has had no real, practical experience of human anatomy?
At the same time that Dr Gunther von Hagens has been championing what he calls ‘the democratisation of anatomy’, strange things have been happening to medical curricula, at least in the UK. It’s now only in a minority of UK medical schools that students still actually perform detailed dissections on a human body. Under pressure to make courses cheaper and easier to deliver, many UK medical schools have now changed their anatomy courses so that their medical students do little dissection themselves. Instead the students acquire their anatomical knowledge by viewing ready-dissected specimens prepared by others, plastic models and computer simulations. The new Peninsula Medical School, based at Plymouth and Exeter, prides itself on the fact that no real human material is used in its anatomy course at all – all the anatomical teaching is carried out using plastic models.
What do you think? Is real dissection important? Is the use of plastic models and computer simulations an appropriate way to teach medical students anatomy? Or have students who missed out on the detail and difficulty of actual dissection had their medical education downgraded?
