There are dead bodies on this campus.
They’re kept beneath Elon University’s McMichael Science Building, stowed away, deep inside a laboratory’s freezer. Within the freezer, the bodies lay one atop the other, bunk-bed style akin to a summer camp cabin.
When descending the stairs to McMichael’s ground level, it gets gradually darker. It also gets gradually cooler. The freezer radiates cold temperatures, but is it the freezer alone, or is it the dead?
This is the myth often associated with Elon’s cadaver lab.
While there are elements of truth to this myth, the dramatic element is exactly that — dramatic, and it’s time to bust some of these myths and reveal the truth about the mysterious anatomy lab.
The Elon cadaver lab is the only one of its kind in the state of North Carolina. It is also one of five in the nation that allows undergraduate study. The opportunity anatomy students are given to dissect a human donor is unparalleled, according to the lab’s student overseer, junior Ann Marie Nunnelee.
“There’s a plaque in the lab that says, ‘This is a place where death nurtures life,’” Nunnelee said. “I don’t think there could be a more appropriate way to put it. Through someone else’s unfortunate demise, I’ve gotten an educational opportunity that I could never imagine.”
Nunnelee is double majoring in exercise science and public health.
As an incoming freshman, she was part of a small group that got to take the anatomy course at the start of college (the opportunity is no longer available without prerequisites).
After taking the course with Matthew Clark, associate professor of biology, she said she became enthralled with the human body and its ability to recover from injury. It was then that the anatomy lab became “her second home.”
But Nunnelee said she realizes the stigma surrounding the lab she supervises and knows it could come across as creepy that she spends so much time with the dead.
“The anatomy lab is not a scary place,” she said. “It might be under McMichael, but it’s just the ground floor. It’s well-lit and there are plants in there so it doesn’t smell so bad. The people who go down there a lot care about the bodies and care that they are treated with respect. You have to think that this is a person as well as someone’s family member.”
Clark is head of the cadaver lab and said he understands this concept especially well. He received his Ph.D. from East Carolina University’s School of Medicine and recalled a tradition East Carolina has for working with human donors — the giving of a pre- and post-memorial service.
“The memorials were services that gave you the opportunity to reflect on what you’ve done and kind of bring you back to what we call, ‘human reality,’” Clark said. “This was very important to students so we incorporated a version of that at the end of each semester here at Elon.”
Nunnelee said she likes to emphasize this human reality to her fellow students at the end of the semester.
“Before students even enter the lab, we emphasize how to respect the body,” she said. “Then at the end of the semester, I’ll come in and tell them about the person they’ve worked with in an informal setting.”
[quote] The anatomy lab is not a scary place ... The people who go down there a lot care about the bodies and care that they are treated with respect. You have to think that this is a person as well as someone’s family member." — junior Ann Marie Nunnelee, cadaver lab's student overseer [/quote]
Through Clark and Nunnelee’s experience with dissecting human donors, they said they’ve acquired the ability to separate the body and its unique parts into regions — upper extremity and brachial instead of arm, thorax and scapular instead of shoulder blade. Their approach is strictly scientific. That is, until a donor’s tattoo or his or her painted nails come into view.
“There are things that make them more human,” Nunnelee said. “Myself and other members of TEATAP [The Elon Anatomy Teaching Assistant Program] were flipping the bodies once because, you know, they start on their stomach and then they have to go on their back. But we had to flip it again to show a part of the spinal chord. We went to flip the body and air had gotten into his digestive system, so when we flipped him back over, his mouth was slightly open and the gas within his digestive system was pushed out through his vocal chords to make a groan. That was possibly the scariest moment of my life.”
To Nunnelee, instances like this remind her of stereotypes surrounding the dead. The difference is that those occurrences can be easily explained.
“Dr. Clark came over and said, ‘Come on, guys’ and showed us the air bubble in the digestive system that caused it,” Nunnelee said.
She said this is one particularly exciting part of the lab — there are always some physical explanations in the anatomy lab, and students, TEATAPs and instructors are in control of the learning.
“TEATAPs play jokes on each other sometimes,” she said. “We know what tendon will move if you pull this part [motions to part of her arm] to make the arm go up, so we do that when another TEATAP is working and can’t see us do it.”
Anatomy students at Elon are able to identify aspects of the human body with this hands-on opportunity that they normally wouldn’t be able to have until graduate school. Elon students have even found cancer that was not accounted for on the donor’s death certificate while dissecting a body.
Clark said he wants the Elon community to know that the process of receiving the human donors is handled very formally.
“The bodies are sent to us from medical schools around the country that have the legal right to prepare human donors for anatomical study,” he said. “We don’t get the donors from the local mortician down the street somewhere. There is a federal regulation for how we get the donors.”
Clark said he is asked questions concerning the handling of the bodies frequently — by students and faculty members alike — that are congruent with the cadaver lab myth instead of the educational cadaver lab Elon students actually experience.
“We’re not in there doing the stuff they do in Halloween movies, running around with body parts and whatnot,” Clark said. “Anatomy is an educational course. When people mention anatomy in association with Halloween, I respond that the dead can’t hurt you, but they can teach you.”