By Brystol Beatley, Staff Writer and Lily Groves, Staff Writer
Unless you take an anatomy or physiology course, there is a good chance you will never meet Wheaton College’s cadavers.
That is, unless you participated in the free tours offered through the collaborative efforts of the Core Book Program and Biological and Health Sciences Department. From Sept. 29 to Oct. 7, the general campus community was invited to tour the cadaver lab and engage themes of death and science present in this year’s core book, “When Breath Becomes Air,” by Paul Kalanithi.
“When Breath Becomes Air” is a posthumously published memoir by Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who lost his life to stage 4 metastatic lung cancer. Kalanithi’s work wrestles with philosophical questions that arise for him as he faces death, but it also draws from his tangible experiences in the medical field. Wheaton College’s liberal arts curriculum encourages students to connect the humanities and the sciences, and learning from Kalanithi’s memoir further allows students to participate in interdisciplinary dialogue.
Dana Townsend, professor emerita of biological and health sciences with 29 years of dissection experience, and Tiffany Kriner, English professor and coordinator of the Core Book Program, led tours of the cadaver lab.
Previously, Kriner visited the anatomy lab to study the structure of hands for a writing project. She recalls her first time in the lab as “edifying, meaningful, fascinating — just an incredible gift to see the intricacy of the human body and the Creator’s intent and design in it.”
The same opportunity immersed students in the topics of death, life and science and provided a window into death that many individuals outside medicine may never have experienced. Townsend explained to students that working in the cadaver lab, so close to death, is a reminder that life is fleeting.
At the start of each tour, before walking into the lab, participants gathered with Townsend and Kriner to discuss how the anatomy program worked. In collaboration with the University of Iowa, Wheaton College receives four bodies at the beginning of each semester, two female and two male, making the school one of the 5% of undergraduate programs to use real cadavers in their anatomy labs.
After they are studied at Wheaton College, they are sent back to the University of Iowa, where, once a year, a memorial service is arranged to acknowledge these individuals’ gift to science and continue to preserve their dignity. The families of the cadavers, as well as medical students and staff, are invited to attend.
The lab, located in the lower level of the Meyer Science Center, hits students immediately with the pungent smell of formaldehyde, a chemical used to preserve cadaver tissues. The four cadavers are placed in a row on top of silver containers labeled “tank 1,” “tank 2” and so on. On the whiteboard, each cadaver’s name, sex, age and cause of death are displayed.
During tours, students were not only invited to look but encouraged to touch various organs and ask questions. Students could see and feel the healthy lungs of one cadaver and compare that to the lungs of another cadaver that had complications from tobacco use. Their experiences reflect the Latin phrase commonly used in anatomy, “mortui vivos docent,” meaning “the dead teach the living.”
As the two-week window for tours ended, Townsend said that her hopes for opening up the cadaver lab to the general campus community had been well met by students who engaged with the content with questions and enthusiastic reflections about death and science.
Townsend and Kriner emphasized the immense gift that these cadavers are. At the end of each tour, either Kriner or Townsend would close with a prayer of gratitude, thanking God for each of the individuals and their families’ sacrifice in giving their bodies for scientific study.
One first-year business major, DJ DeJesus, said he could not stop sharing his experience after touring the anatomy lab. He said, “I thought it was a super awesome experience and it’s going to be a memory that stays with me for a while, in a way that kind of makes me hopeful.”
