Student Stories: Life in the Dissection Room
First year BSc (Hons) student Dong Min Huh shares his experience in the Dissection Room.
If you asked 100 medical students what the best part of studying Medicine in St Andrews is, I’d confidently bet that most of them would give the same answer: the opportunity to do full body dissections.
There’s something incredibly different about seeing anatomy in real life, not just on slides or diagrams, but in three dimensions, right in front of you. The Dissection Room (DR) is the one place that you can enter being extremely confused about what you learned over the past week in lectures but come out with newfound understanding and confidence, as everything clicks into place. None of this would be possible without the extraordinary generosity of local individuals who have donated their bodies to help train future doctors.
For me, walking into the Dissection Room for the first time was extremely nerve-wracking and exciting. Having heard stories about people fainting during their first DR session, I was worried that I would do the same. What I did find challenging was the distinctive odour of embalming chemicals. To preserve the bodies, each one is treated with chemicals. The novelty of this odour can be challenging – making it the one and only downside of dissection classes.
However, once we became familiar with the instruments and started dissecting, everything – including the distinctive odour – faded into the background. Holding a scalpel for the first time and making my first incision felt like a rite of passage. Although initially reluctant to cut through the skin of the donor and begin our journey of discovery; looking for various vessels, muscles and bones, under the guidance of the Demonstrators, we quickly became more proficient and confident as our skill grew.
A personal highlight for me during my time in the DR was when we had to use the appropriate instruments to carefully remove a piece of the spine to uncover the structures that lie below it. What made it even more fascinating was recognising signs of a condition that had previously affected our donor.
I asked a few of my classmates to share their impressions and experiences in the DR:
Marek Zeleny: “It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of the medical curriculum – dissecting makes me appreciate the body more and transfers lecture knowledge to real life.”
Mitchell Tong: “Every dissection session I participate in furthers my interest in medicine and appreciation for the complexity of the human body that a textbook or model cannot illustrate.”