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Med school allows non-students to help with cadaver prosection program

Ever wish you had could watch, or even participate in, the dissection of a cadaver? I'm personally too squeamish for such things, but there's a medical school that offers the opportunity to interested non-students.

As recently reported by the Health Blog, each year the Indiana University School of Medicine-Northwest selects a group of outside volunteers to take part in the schools’ cadaver prosection program:

...That means they’re prepping the donor bodies (by stripping back the skin and body fat to reveal what lies beneath) for that first-year med student ritual: the anatomy lab.

The volunteer program was started a decade ago by Ernest Talarico, the school’s assistant director of medical education and course director of human gross anatomy and embryology. The intent is to get people interested in anatomy at a time when the number of teachers in the field has declined, he says. This year, the 47 participants in the program are mostly students and professionals in health-related fields, but applications are welcome from people in “all walks of life,” says Talarico. (One former participant was a Cherokee Indian chief who happened to be a taxidermist.)

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