Cadaver dissection

What are the advantages?

1. You can say you did cadaver dissection and impress your friends.
2. Tradition

Haha trivia aside, what are some serious advantages, perhaps in terms of your development as a future doctor?

I'm not a medic, but having dissected a pigs heart at college, I found it brought to life (pardon the pun) what we had been learning about.

Honestly, having done dissection not much if comparing it to prosection. Some trivial benefits include getting a real feel for the human body and how it is organized, noting variations between different people.

If you are interested in surgery there may be that getting a feel for the different instruments, looking for anatomical structures.

I guess fundamentally you care more about the anatomy because you actually spend time with the cadaver and you put effort into dissecting it and it is always positive for your learning to take the theoretical pictures you see in textbooks and actually see them for yourself in real life.

If you are comparing dissection to nothing at all, then there are major benefits.

I guess closeness to death and learning how to deal with that would be an advantage.

Speaking from personal experience, I didn't find there was as much to gain from it as I had initially thought. We had prosections about as well as dissecting and the prosections were obviously better dissected, much cleaner and more representative and therefore better to learn from. Dissection I found wasted time for no good reason (without being disrespectful to the cadavers), and I really didn't see any advantage when compared to the prosections, except maybe getting an appreciation of the layers of the body and how deep some structures can be. With regards to surgical skills/tools, because the cadaver is not alive (and there's no risk of killing..) I think you'll find technique goes out of the window after a few hours (to get to the structure within your time limit), so I don't think you should think of surgical skills as an advantage at all - surgical skills will be taught later in med school.

As someone above rightly pointed out it also depends what you're comparing dissection to. If you're comparing it to nothing, then ofcourse it's more advantageous. If you're comparing it to prosections, I'm really not so sure. In short I didn't find anything overly advantageous about it, and I would think twice about going to medical school X over Y purely because of dissection.

The above are my opinions only ofcourse and I'm sure other people have different opinions..

Speaking from personal experience, I didn't find there was as much to gain from it as I had initially thought. We had prosections about as well as dissecting and the prosections were obviously better dissected, much cleaner and more representative and therefore better to learn from. Dissection I found wasted time for no good reason (without being disrespectful to the cadavers), and I really didn't see any advantage when compared to the prosections, except maybe getting an appreciation of the layers of the body and how deep some structures can be. With regards to surgical skills/tools, because the cadaver is not alive (and there's no risk of killing..) I think you'll find technique goes out of the window after a few hours (to get to the structure within your time limit), so I don't think you should think of surgical skills as an advantage at all - surgical skills will be taught later in med school.

As someone above rightly pointed out it also depends what you're comparing dissection to. If you're comparing it to nothing, then ofcourse it's more advantageous. If you're comparing it to prosections, I'm really not so sure. In short I didn't find anything overly advantageous about it, and I would think twice about going to medical school X over Y purely because of dissection.

The above are my opinions only ofcourse and I'm sure other people have different opinions..