Year 4 medical student, Heen Shamaz provides an insight into her summer internship as an anatomy dissector at Teviot Place.
The student summer anatomy dissector job is a six week job with the Anatomy Department here at Edinburgh Medical School, every May through June.
When I first received the email advertising this job, I felt daunted by the idea of putting scalpel to real human bodies. I had previously only had limited exposure to cadaveric specimens from anatomy learning, however nothing in a practical sense. My interest in surgery and keenness to try something new made me apply for the job, which to my surprise, was popular amongst medical students across year groups, and on the interview day over 50 people showed up!
Learning new skills as a team
I was over the moon to find out that I was one of six dissectors chosen for the job. On our first day we were introduced to all of the wonderful technicians in the anatomy teaching lab, who I now realise are very overlooked when we are taught anatomy as part of our course. We were given lab coats and our very own dissection kits, as well as our first task – to do a whole-body dissection which would later be used to introduce the new Year 1s to anatomy.
It turns out that dissection requires a lot of patience and particular techniques depending on which part of the body you dissect. Most of us had no experience in dissecting and so every day was a learning experience. With six of us working together on one body, we had amazing bonding time with everyone helping each other, keeping us on track to finishing this dissection in just a week.
My favourite dissection
After this task we were given different specimens to work on, varying from upper and lower body limbs to internal organs. My favourite dissection was the heart, as an aspiring cardiac surgeon, this had to be one of the highlights of my entire year! It felt so surreal removing the heart from the body, and then having the opportunity to work so intricately with the coronary vessels.
The academic staff and technicians were incredibly supportive and encouraging which kept us motivated to produce pieces of artwork, medicine is absolutely not all about textbooks!
Another dissection I performed was of the head and neck, I felt this to be an intimidating task at first, however I wanted to get the most out of this one-of-a-kind experience. This drove me to conquer challenges and by the end, not only did I produce a dissection I was proud of, but I also had a new admiration for head and neck surgeons.
On the last day of our job, all of the academic staff and technicians gathered around the lab, and we did a show and tell of all of the specimens we had worked with in the past six weeks. We had learned so much anatomy and seeing all of the specimens laid out in front of us made us feel honoured.
This has been an amazing experience and I am so grateful for the opportunity. I want to say a special thank you to every donor and family who donates their body to medicine, because without them we really can’t even begin to comprehend the beautiful complexities of the human.
