Donated to Science

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

If other people think, "Why would he want to do that",

that's their problem not mine.

I don't have a problem.

We will be opening up a cadaver,

a body bag,

to show you a dead person.

Hold the scalpel handle something like this,

between the thumb and middle finger.

It's going to be very scary, I'll be right up there at the front,

but it will be very, very scary.

Today we're going to remove the calvaria, which is the skull cap,

and expose the brain.

Looking at the dissection and realising just how much

we had taken apart this person...

To have it affect me so much this year, it kind of shocked me,

cos I was like, "I'm not supposed to feel like this.

"Why can't I handle it? Why can't I just go in and dissect my body?"

I'm mourning for the loss of a death that I just didn't know.

To a life that I missed out on...

..and...

..a body that I destroyed.

On behalf of Pam, James, Callum, Natalie and Ian's extended family,

it is my privilege to thank you for coming today.

When we were planning the funeral I thought, "How do we do this?"

Because a lot of people didn't know about Ian's decision.

So I did think about asking to have an empty casket up there

so that people wouldn't walk in and go, "Oh! Where's the body?"

We had the service for our closure,

not for any religious things

because we're not a religious family.

And a lot of people, friends, hadn't realised that Ian was sick,

so we just wanted to...

have the service and just remember him.

I hope that it doesn't upset in any way.

For me, I'm quite calm about the whole thing.

It's a body, they can treat it with respect,

which I have no doubt that they will do.

Apart from that, they just use it the best way they can.

It's there to be used. I hope they use it and use it wisely.

I always knew that Dad was going to donate his body,

so that was always there, but nearer the time when the process...

When you actually start thinking, "What is going to happen?"

Small things, like his body wasn't going to be at the funeral.

The decision to donate my body is...

..simply to help the students...

and to make my parting easier for my family and loved ones.

Good morning, everybody.

Just to remind you, I'm Helen Nicholson

and I'm going to talk to you today

about the use of cadavers and the ethics behind them.

'Going back to our bequestee,'

he's - or she's - put in storage,

then in about a year's time,

he'll come out to the dissecting room and you guys and the physios

and the dentists will all work on these bodies for the next two years.

I decided I wanted to be a doctor when I was 11.

It was when I first decided that I loved science

and was actually quite good at science.

I guess I want to be a hero. I want to save people's lives, I think.

I think...you know, you watch programmes like ER...

not Shortland Street, but ER and you just...

I just want to save people's lives.

My father has a kidney transplant

and so I've always kind of been interested in wanting to help him

and it just really annoyed me just sitting there

and not knowing what to do to help.

I'd like to say that my attitude to the body would be impassionate,

that I would feel nothing looking at them

because they were just a body, but it's hard not to see a body

and not think of a life.

So, I shall see.

'I think I've seen death quite a lot in life.

'I've met it and I...

'..acknowledged it.'

And I think that made me see death in a more positive way,

I'm not scared of it.

Cell phones turned off, either left here or in your pocket, OK?

As a teenager, I had an obsession with my own mortality

and quite a strong fear of death.

And, er...

I think dealing with dead bodies and human dissection

will allow me to kind of cross a bridge, which I need to.

On the first day, when the students come in,

it's just the environment, the smells here,

the body bags - they are very daunting for them.

We will be opening up a cadaver,

a body bag, to show you a dead person,

and I will take you in little groups to do that.

I think that I've had a pretty good body.

It's never let me down.

I've never really been... Apart from having lead poisoning

and now cancer, I've never really had anything bad wrong with me.

It is quite normal to feel sick,

it is quite normal to feel sad,

it is quite normal to feel unwell.

I've never seen a dead body before,

and to have all these people, you know, that are dead...

That could be someone's mother or father or sister.

It'll be quite full on.

Come around, come around.

What we'll do is we'll just expose up to the belly button.

Has anyone got any questions?

Looking at the body for the first time was a little bit shocking

because you weren't expecting his eyes to be open,

you weren't expecting his expression to be like he was in pain,

or anything like that.

I guess it was a bit naive to think that they'd look like

the person was asleep, which was completely not true at all.

He looked very unhealthy.

This person must have thought about donating his body

WELL before 52, so in his 40s, and young people do not do that,

so this person is particularly special.

'It's such an amazing thing.

to sort of give up your loved one's body

even though their soul's, like, obviously somewhere else,

but it's still what you have left of them.

To give it to...well, me... so that I can learn.

-Is the loss of weight after...?

-No, you see, the history said

that he had cancer, so that's before he died, they become cachectic,

and in the end stages of cancer, they lose a lot of weight.

It's a pretty harrowing experience, you know, really,

because I've never seen a dead body before and...

I don't know, you feel...

..like you're invading someone's privacy

by looking at, you know, their body.

-You all right?

-Yeah.

It was something like I've never experienced before.

It was incredibly stressful.

I found it really, really difficult.

'Occasionally, we have students in the first week who decide

'they do not want to do medicine anymore because of the stress

'that they go through in the first week.'

I always think that these kind of people will make very good doctors.

They are emotional people so they will be sympathetic to others

that they deal with later on in life.

But we just need to wait and see

how they react to the actual dissection procedures,

how they face the concept of picking up instruments

and getting into the actual procedures.

When the students get their first chance to dissect,

often it's a limb that they will do first,

so their first chance of holding a scalpel,

of making that incision and watching how they cope with that...

that's a fascinating thing to watch.

For nearly all of you,

this will be a completely new experience,

so I thought would be helpful, at the start,

to go over some of the basic techniques of dissection.

It's going to be scary, it's going to be very scary,

I'll be right up there at the front,

but it will be very, very scary.

Hold the scalpel handle

something like this, between the thumb and middle finger

and then put your index finger on the shoulder of the handle.

If you hold it like that, you can put quite a lot of pressure

on the scalpel handle and push it downwards.

You can apply quite a firm pressure on that blade.

Walking up to the dissection room

and being able to dissect on real bodies

will be both intimidating and fascinating.

I would gently move the scalpel blade downwards like this,

following that line, cutting along that line.

I'm not cutting very deeply because of the thickness of the skin.

I remember feeling extremely nervous the first time

I went in to a dissection room. I remember feeling rather horrified

the first time I saw an incision on a cadaver.

'Usually, when you look at a dead body,

'I guess you say, "This is so and so's body",'

but...

..you think of their character still being part of it.

I guess...

once I start, you know,

handling dead bodies, in a sense...

I'll have to remove myself, or I wouldn't be able to do it.

I would cut like this,

and I would try to take the skin away as a layer.

The body's not like a piece of meat in a supermarket.

You know, it's a human body,

it used to be a person, you know.

A person that's laughed and a person that's cried

and now I'm going to cut them up.

That's uncomfortable.

'When you're dead, you're dead.

'It's not as though you're there living through something

'that you wouldn't want to live through.'

And whether that is because of our active mind telling us

that, "Gee whizz, they're going to do this to me and that to me",

I don't know, but that part of it does not worry me.

'I went first because...'

if I didn't, we might never have started.

We were all just standing there looking at it

and nobody wanted to be that person to make that first incision.

We could have been still standing there

staring at his body at the end of the session.

'When we first started doing the dissection,'

I actually stood back a bit.

We had some very keen future surgeons in our group

and they were happy to get in there, and that was fine by me.

I was quite happy just to stand back and watch for a bit.

'I could just imagine someone doing the same thing to my leg'

and how painful that would feel,

and actually making the incision

was even worse, because...

Well, nothing quite prepares you

for cutting through someone else's skin, I think.

'When they actually have to make the incisions themselves,'

and it's the excitement of the discovery,

and the realisation that they are cutting open a human body.

To me, that's a very rewarding and enriching experience.

His skin was very...

..kind of thin and delicate

and it gave way very easily, so...

But it wasn't like slicing up a piece of meat for dinner.

It was a very different experience.

'It was quite brutal, I must admit.

'And it was quite hard to go through the layers

'and see the different structures

'that we had to identify and all that.'

I've always been proud of my back. I've always had a very strong back.

My back has never given me trouble until now.

I've done some fairly hard work in my life.

I was a milkman for quite a few years

and your back gets a fair hammering at being a milkman.

One thing that I realised was...

how easy it was to start...

..seeing the body as a tool of learning rather than a person.

And so after...

two or three times of dissection classes,

I have to remind myself again of how this was a live person.

'Clearly, there's a practical element to the dissection,'

but I think there's a huge emotional element to dissection

that is very hard to quantify and put your finger on.

It's to do with dealing with the dead human body,

coming to terms with what a privilege it is to do that...

..and I think our students do that well on the whole.

I hope that they look at it.

They don't just do it as a daily routine that we've got to do this

and we've got to do that.

They look at it and...

remember the part of the anatomy they're working on

and hopefully, that might help somebody

that has got something wrong with them in the future

just by the fact that they took a bit more careful notice

of what they were doing.

I think it's probably going to be one of the most important

learning things I'll do

because...you know, you'll look at a heart or you'll go to a patient

and see their heart and in your mind, you'll know every single heart

will sort of be the heart of the first body you dissected.

Today you'll be fracturing some ribs.

Not your own, but the cadaver's, you WILL be fracturing some

and that's not very pleasant. You'll have to take a rib cutter

at some stage in the proceedings, towards the end of the dissection,

and you will have to be cutting through the ribs laterally

and medially in order to detach the anterior and lateral chest wall

to expose the underlying lungs and pleura.

Be careful when you come to do that manoeuvre -

the bone spikes can be pretty sharp and you can injure yourself,

so please be careful with that.

Opening the chest was a bit difficult

because you had to cut through ribs and cut through the clavicle,

and cut a bit here and a bit there.

The tools that we used to do that are quite...wooden tools,

like wooden work tools.

I smoked for 48 years...

I don't really have a lot of lung trouble that I really know of.

But grateful for the day that I decided to knock off smoking

20 odd years ago.

'The lungs were a lot heavier than I expected.'

I don't know... I kind of had this idea that they were light

and fluffy, but they're not.

I couldn't really take my hands off it

because I just wanted to see it inflate and deflate.

'I don't find the lungs very fascinating.

'In a cadaver, they remind me of pneumonia -'

they are heavy, they are sodden, they are discoloured.

Whereas in a living person they are pink, they are aerated,

they are collapsible.

They are beautiful structures in a living person.

So I find the lungs in the cadaver very disappointing,

very different to how I find the heart in a cadaver.

To me, opening the chest and taking out the heart is something

that is so exciting

because the heart is such a wondrous structure.

I never, ever cease to be amazed when you open the heart

and you look at those delicate valves inside the heart

and the beautiful little strings

that connect the valves to the muscle.

I find it astonishing that that structure can beat

almost three billion times in a lifetime.

My father, he had a very strong heart

and when he died they said it wasn't his heart that let him down.

He actually had emphysema.

And I've feel that I've always had a heart like my dad.

My best bit would have to be my heart because my brain's buggered.

'It's pretty inspiring, actually.'

I don't know why, but I've always seen the heart

as sort of just the heart and not the seat of the soul,

so it was quite inspiring to pull it out and take a look at it.

You'll see that some of them will have red latex

injected into the arteries.

This makes it easier for you to dissect.

'The way you hold muscle is different to the way you hold a heart.

'You know, the heart, it's deep inside the chest

'and it's protected all around'

and, you know, there's so much sort of romanticising that goes on

about the heart, you know.

It's "love with all your heart" or "do with all your heart".

When you put your head against someone's chest

you hear their heart beat.

And when you have a pulse, it means that someone's alive.

So it's like it gives life and it gives emotion.

It's definitely more than just a muscle...

..it's something amazing.

'It was only a heart, it was only a pump.

'It was really nothing that special for me.'

It's only a machine

and it's attached with a lot of pipes

to other areas of the body,

but it's not actually who we are, and it's not our soul.

'You know, some days,'

I think I'm OK with what I'm doing, you know.

And you know, some days, I think I'm not.

And I'd just rather sit back and let somebody else do it

and take in what I can without actually...

you know...

..being part of it.

Ian's decision

to donate his body has made it difficult

to actually walk past the medical school without thinking,

"I wonder if he's in there, I wonder where he is."

When someone dies, and they're buried,

that's where they are, you know. They're not going anywhere,

or you've got their ashes and that's where they are.

'This service is an opportunity for us students'

and staff to say thank you.

To say thank you to your loved ones for the huge gift

that they've given us.

When somebody dies and comes to us,

they come to us very quickly...

..so the family don't have a normal funeral service -

they don't have a funeral service with the body in a coffin.

'I did feel at the funeral, there was no body.'

There was a bunch of flowers and that was different, um,

I suppose it rattled my cage a bit that Dad wasn't at his funeral.

And when you're sitting in a church or at a service

and there's a bunch of flowers, it's not the same.

We went to the funeral

and there was no coffin, there was no body there,

and we said to Mum, you know, "Where is she?"

And she said her body had been donated.

She drove us past the building, the anatomy department building,

and said, "She's in there", so I always actually expected,

if I went into the building,

I expected her to be in a bottle peering out.

So I never go into that building.

I didn't realise that so many people donated their body

and when the medical students got up and talked...

..they showed such respect for the bodies.

"A time to weep and a time to laugh,

"a time to mourn and a time to dance."

'I talked to the relatives of the donors and...'

..it just...

it kind of started to hit me

how hard it was for them.

And what do they do with the bits

after you've finished with it? It gets cremated...?

I think they get cremated.

That's what we heard - they were cremated and the ashes sprinkled.

Yes.

Quite devastated not to say goodbye to Noel.

It's been a little wound that needed a bit of healing,

I knew it needed to come to closure,

so when I saw this was on, I thought, "That's an absolute gift."

INAUDIBLE SPEECH

Today we're going to progress with the abdomen, we're going to start

looking inside the abdomen, and this is what a surgeon does

when they do something called a laparotomy,

looking inside the abdomen.

To me, it's very exciting opening the abdomen,

because the abdomen is like a black box, really.

You operate on people with severe abdominal pain

and you don't always know what you're going to find.

When you actually get in there and you open up the abdomen,

you can see that it IS actually...

where the textbooks say it is. It does look almost exactly the same.

Conveniently, the bile ducts are all coloured green,

like they are in the textbooks.

And it's just amazing to actually see where it all fits.

When I take my tablets now, I take them all together

and I look at them and think,

"How the hell do you know which way you're supposed to go?" You know.

But the body knows which one, where it's supposed to go to.

So it's a pretty clever piece of mechanism when you think about it.

'I think a very underrated organ is the human bowel.'

I think that students tend to look at this as

rather an indelicate piece of tubing

which is potentially smelly and rather unpleasant.

Probably the best way to describe the pelvis and the abdomen was

brown and smelly.

Um, that's pretty much what I got from it.

I enjoyed dissecting it again, but it was...

It didn't look as cool as what I guess it looks in textbooks.

'I didn't really cope very well with the abdomen,'

because I wasn't taking into account what it was going to smell like,

and the smell kind of hit me a lot stronger than I was expecting it to.

Um, cos I was kind of getting to the point where I could cope

quite decently after the thorax,

but abdomen was a whole different thing.

Perhaps this isn't the most PC thing to say,

but while we were doing it, all I could think about was

"Wow, you can actually hold a lot of crap inside,"

because we actually had to slice rectum into two,

and it kind of smushed out on the side,

and I was like, "Wow."

See the stomach and the spleen are connected there? >

Gastric arteries... >

Got a beautiful appendix...

I hope to God I'm there when some know-all decides

he's going to find my bits that are missing.

I can just imagine, you know,

"Oh, you said the gall bladder's...uh?

"The gall bladder's not there."

< Take this clot out and you will see

< where the hepatic veins drain.

< As you can see,

< the IVC is hugged by the liver

and so you don't see the hepatic veins anywhere outside.

We'll open that up and we'll see

what's happening inside.

So you will be the people diagnosing the other way,

diagnosing what the surgeon has done. OK?

There's a lump there.

You'll have to discover what that lump is.

OK.

The homework is to read

and see what could be a mass in this area.

It's in the right iliac fossa area. Come up with some ideas.

'I was quite frustrated that I didn't know what it was.

'It just looked odd.'

It was in the wrong place and the wrong shape

for everything that's supposed to be there and it was just odd.

Ah! What did you find?

-A kidney.

-Well done, you.

Then we found he had a kidney transplant, and...

Well, half the story behind it. That was very interesting.

'If I have a real case and a real story behind it, I'll remember it.'

There, it's sitting so nicely.

This is what you'd find in the lumbar area where the kidney is sitting,

so they've made a space in the iliac fossa.

'I was really interested to see it,

'cos my dad has a kidney transplant.'

I was surprised to see they put it in the iliac fossa

because I obviously hadn't done my reading, but, um...

yeah, it's like, "Woah, this is what's in my dad," you know.

I was just really interested from that kind of view.

And, yeah, so I picked it up and had a look at it.

< Dr Samalia's table over there,

< they have a cadaver who's had a kidney transplant.

Today we're going to remove the calvaria, which is the skullcap,

and expose the brain. Now, this is probably

the most difficult thing for you to do,

I mean, difficult in that it's not an easy dissection.

We give them a preamble, we try to talk to them a lot about it,

and we get the demonstrators to talk very carefully

through the procedure. You are seeing something you will probably

never see again in your career.

And then there is nothing more than having to just go and do it.

'We're presented with, you know, our cadaver,'

and the head has been, you know, sort of prepared -

they saw around the skull

and the calvaria.

There's a levering. Suddenly the skullcap is removed

and the brain is removed in front of you

with a suction noise when the cap comes off.

'Almost like a Velcro sound,'

but more violent, more ripping.

'It was like opening a gift.'

I had no idea what was inside it and how does it look in a real human.

For me, it was unique. I will never get that experience again

and that's so special.

We had to use what they call a "brain knife",

which was this interesting-looking knife

which you couldn't saw back and forth,

you had to make one clean cut. And that was quite challenging,

because the brain's kind of soft and spongy,

so if you press it down, it feels like you're injuring it somehow.

'When students do this,

'it does detach them a bit from what they're doing,'

'and they start thinking about it in terms of what they're learning.'

I don't think I'd want to be part of it if I didn't think it was of use.

'When you study the human body more and more,

'you realise that the brain

'is the most complicated part of it.'

Your personality and so much of you depend upon your brain,

like your movement depended on your brain,

feeling depended on your brain,

who you were depended on how hormones interacted with your brain.

'If it wasn't for your brain you wouldn't be doing anything,'

I mean...so that's got to be the most interesting.

It was strange initially,

cos I've never imagined that this small mushy thing,

is the thing that actually makes us work and makes us who we are,

I kept bringing it back to myself and this is what's in my head

and this is what makes me who I am.

'I haven't got a clue how my brain works,'

erm, so maybe I'm not as clever as I thought I was!

'To hold someone's brain in your hand is incredible,'

it's the most incredible feeling.

We know, we've learnt all the pathways about how a neuron fires

and that makes us move our arm,

but there's absolutely no concept

of what is it that makes the neuron fire in the first place?

What is it that makes us decide we want to move our arm?

Like, that is what absolutely fascinates me.

The idea of thought and where that comes from is amazing.

It was like looking at a motherboard of a computer,

it's just a mass of wiring.

'When you try to learn about what the brain does,

'you start to realise just how much,'

like, how complex it is, and how much it is impossible

to learn everything that the brain does.

No matter how much we study it, and...

..how many levels we dissect it to and how far we break it down,

we will never capture the essence of what makes it work.

This is a very historic day for you,

because this is your last dissection session.

You're completing a journey today

that you started almost two years ago,

and I think we need to reflect for a moment on one or two things.

First, we need to reflect once again on the outstanding generosity

of the people who have bequested their bodies

to allow you to study to become knowledgeable and safe doctors.

'Yoomi, Katherine and I started to organise the pieces together

'putting it together, and it was important to do.'

And I felt quite good.

I felt kind of... saying thank you out loud,

but that would've been awkward.

I was...

I was sad...

..because he'd given us so much

and we just seemed to take and take and take from him.

When we tried to put him back together,

we couldn't. It was...

I didn't really like that part very much.

I got quite attached to our guy.

Never going to see him again.

It probably would've upset me if we'd left him

without putting him back the way he should be.

And I don't even know why. I think it's probably just...

..some natural instinct that it's what should happen.

By the end of the dissection, looking at the dissection

and realising...

just how much we had taken apart this person,

I guess in some ways that was great

because we got the most out of this gift as we possibly could have.

Initially, I thought...

..what we were doing in dissection was desecration.

But now I don't think so.

I think there is no other way

to learn what we've learned from dissection.

I've always prided myself on being able to man up and take it.

"It doesn't bother me, I'm not an emotional person,"

and then to have it affect me so much this year, it kind of shocked me.

I was like, "I'm not supposed to be feeling like this.

"Why can't I handle it? Why can't I just go and dissect my body?"

I think I've come to like that part of me and appreciate

how important it is.

I think the body's life in the dissection room is different.

I would say it's a specimen, it's a subject,

it's just more like tissue,

which is a sad thing to say, but that's the reality of it.

I think everyone treated the body as well as we could've treated it.

This journey, these two years in dissection, have been like...

..unveiling a shroud of mystery of the human body.

A comparison would be...

gaining the X-ray eyes of Superman.

I learnt that I am much more sensitive than I'd like to admit.

I learnt that...

..I'm not very good with death.

I'm not a lot like a lot of my classmates...

..in that I'm not nearly as driven or sure that this is what I want.

I guess...

..I've learnt that at the end of the day,

we came from dust and we're coming back to be dust, really.

There's a lot in between - we have a full life in between -

but the body itself is only...

..material, really.

There's nothing more to it.

I don't so much have a problem with death any more,

and...I could put it down to time,

or I could put it down to education,

but it's probably more along the lines

of I've spent the better part of two years...

..looking at dead people and their body parts.

I'm not so afraid of death any more.

Relieved.

Relieved, emancipated.

I feel...

free.

I'd like to know why he made the decisions he did, and...

..I'd like to see how he came to be the man who lies on our table.

'We had the chance to see the interview with the donors.'

I felt extremely privileged to be able to see...

..the people that they used to be

and their thoughts and their feelings and their...

insight about what they're going to do.

'All in all, looking back, I've had a very interesting life'

and I've had a wonderful, caring family,

which I'm absolutely grateful for.

'Brought up through the worst part of the Depression...'

It was an amazing experience

and I think it's going to stay with me forever.

And that's going to be, for me, fulfilling their wishes.

I think there's no replacement for that feeling,

I think it was...it was amazing

and it was extremely important for me to see that.

It was weird seeing him talk and kind of...

see bits on him that I do remember,

how it looked in the dissection room,

and it was really weird thinking, when he talked about his heart,

yes, his heart was a really good heart and his lungs were really good

and I wouldn't have suspected he smoked,

I just thought he may have been exposed to cities or something.

It's actually sort of a revelation for me because...

I initially thought...

you know, "It used to be a person,

"this is someone's loved one."

But it's not, it's not someone's loved one at all - it's just a body.

It just really hits you that it's not just a cadaver,

it was a person.

Just to hear him say in that interview

that the last thing...he wanted

was people to think he was selfish...

..just made me a bit, well, really upset.

I've had a terrific life,

I reckon I've crammed about...

..three lives into one.

I never expected to get past 40 -

I'll be 75 this year, that's a lot of extra years,

a lot of extra fun and things that I've been able to do for people

and that's what I feel life is all about.

In the last few months, he showed a way different side to his character

that I hadn't seen, a strength actually that I hadn't seen.

And I was really proud of the way he...

..he found closure with the family.

I'm mourning for the loss of a death that I just didn't know,

to a life that I missed out on...

..and...

..and a body that I destroyed.

And the worst part is...

that's what he wanted.

He didn't want us...

..to do what I'm doing now. He just...

wanted us to learn.

I guess thank you doesn't really cut it because, you know...

I ho...

I hope...

I hope if they saw, I hope if the donor saw what we did,

they'd still be pleased that they did it.

# It's always a struggle

# To let somebody go... #

I hope everyone understands why Dad did it,

but I appreciate that, no, probably not all will.

If other people think, "Why would he want to do that?"

that's their problem, not mine.

I don't have a problem.

# Take me to the fantastic place

# Keep the rest of my life away

# Take me to the fantastic place

# Keep the rest of my life away

# Take me to the island

# I'll watch the rain over your shoulder

# The streetlights in the water... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]