Probably more than the average serial killer
So, this long term lurker has been seduced out of lurkerage for this weeks QOTW, because I have indeed seen dead bodies. Many of them. I inexpertly slice them up on a weekly basis.

For the record, let me first say that the majority of stories about med students and dissection cadavers are false, or at least very very outdated.
No student in their right mind is going to remove any bit of human tissue from the lab for the purpose of amusing japery, simply because if you get caught, you don't just get kicked out of med school, you also get prosecuted under the EU Human Tissue Thingummy. Presumably you then go to jail and get arseraped by a large man called Bazzer.

For those of you who have never known the wrong and strange pleasure of detatching connective tissue from the underside of a rib cage using one's fingers (it makes a slight tearing sound) or who have never smelt formalin at nine in the morning while still slightly drunk from the night before, I present: The Wisdom of The Dissection Room

1- You look like food.
Muscles, slightly inexpertly cut away, look like bits of tuna. The inside of the chest cavity smells oddly of lamb, possibly lamb with a formaldehyde sauce. There are entire societies of med students, usually rugby players, who are based chiefly upon the concept that eating a steak after dissection is manly and hard. At least we're not as bad as vet students. When they have fresh (non-embalmed) dissections of cows and the like, apparently loads of them nick off with the meat. One way of acquiring supper, I suppose.

2. Formalin (the main embalming fluid) does not smell good. It does not smell good in the dissecting room. It does not smell good on the crowded tube home. It does not smell good after you've showered for half an hour and used an entire bottle of Satsuma Bodywash in a vain attempt to rid yourself of the odour before your first date with an extremely hot anthropology second year, who will sniff the air at intervals throughout the evening with a puzzled and slightly revolted look.

3. Lungs can explode.
When removing the top of the rib cage, if it really isn't coming off, there's a possibility that your cadaver might be a wee bit abnormal. Giving it "a good yank" is not an approved dissection technique and may result in fragments of the severely adhesioned lung separating abruptly from the main section and landing in your hair.

4. Everything inside you looks exactly like every thing else.
Not quite, but nearly. If it's yellow and slightly hard it's adipose tissue (fat). If it's reddish pink and striated it's probably muscle. If it's red and squishy, it could be anything. If it's red and stringy, it's definitly a vein or a nerve. Or an arteriole. Or a ligament. Or just a strand of muscle. Something like that.

5. Cutting up dead people is really boring.
Yeah, it really is. You'd think it would feel all taboo and forbidden, especially with the catholic church forbidding it for like a bajillion years, but in fact it's kind of dull. It turns out that people are in fact more interesting alive, even old people.

6. If you accidently cut off the umbilicus (belly button) of your cadavar, and you really weren't meant to, and it needs to be attatched so you can use it to reference the location of everything else you see.... just live with the fact that you screwed up. DO NOT TRY TO REATTATCH SAID UMBILICUS WITH GLUE. This is important. You will only make everything worse.

God, I wish someone had told me that before I started med school.
(yes_slash_no, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 19:05, 2 replies)

good post to unlurk with
between the exploding lungs in your hair and gluing the umbilicus back, I had to chuckle quite a bit.

I can see how elmer's glue wouldn't work....but surely super-glue would have worked?
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Sat 1 Mar 2008, 4:50, closed)

It was the gritty feeling in your mouth...
...once you've sawn off the top of the skull that got me. And the smell of singed bone as you go at it a bit hard with the saw.

That and the crappy spotter sections where your only chance of passing is memorising where the labelled pins are the day before and then trying to find the holes they were in on exam day.

Oh, and the fun you can have on a hot, hungover day with a body whose brain hasn't been properly preserved and sort of flows out of the cranium like a helf-melted shit-flavoured jelly.
( sm.pl.crt.rs I don't fucking know, do I?, Tue 4 Mar 2008, 9:26, closed)