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Comment by GJim | Hacker News Reader

In the late 19th and early 20th century it was commonplace for educational skeletons to be made from real bodies, frequently sold by poor Indian families. This only stopped when plastic became a practical option.

And before somebody cries foul; education is very important, and real bodies were once the only source of durable anatomically correct teaching skeletons.

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A colleague of mine studied physiology and anatomy at McGill University likely in the 1970s. She said the cadavers were mainly unclaimed bodies of homeless people from the city of Montreal. The rule was that all work was to be done in the university labs, but she said students often snuck body parts out to conduct dissection work after hours in their dorm rooms. A lot has changed in the field, but it wasn't that long ago that we treated the dead like a tool.

Times have changed, now the living are treated no better. I kid, I kid.

In Michael Crichton's, "Travels", he discusses his experience dissecting a human body while in med school. The two most memorable bits: 1) the dissection triggered a hunger response in people and 2) they kept the hands covered to help the students dehumanize the body. I don't mean "dehumanize" in the sense of removing their dignity, but the hands apparently can make it more difficult to study the body as a subject and not a dead human.

I read it years ago, but remember really enjoying it.

>the dissection triggered a hunger response in people

this is supposedly from the formaldehyde

I had never heard this, but yeah, that's a thing. Thank you.

Medical schools in countries like Argentina use cadavers as an essential tool for teaching anatomy, allowing students to gain hands-on experience and a deeper understanding of human anatomy.

You may have misunderstood the above comment. While using cadavers in medical education is commonplace, _taking body parts home_ is no longer the norm.

However, cadaver parts are now surgically implanted in patients for a variety of reasons, and those are certainly taken home.

A quick search results in "allograft bone."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_grafting

How is that related to medical students taking body parts out of a lab and dissecting them at home?

The body parts are going home.

In some contexts, this is forbidden, unorthodox, or expected.

In 18th to early 19th century US/England, body snatching aka grave robbing was a common activity of medical students. And in England, it was a profession. As was guarding the freshly buried against such. When New York Hospital and Columbia didn't limit themselves to blacks, you got the 1788 Doctors' Riot and several deaths. A riot at Yale in 1824.

I wonder if you could teach history by emphasizing "surprises for the time traveler"?

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