HW 51- Second third of Care of the Dead Book

Precis: Although cadavers are sometimes used for lesser purposes, they are almost always helpful (at least for research) in some way. Cadavers can be operated on as practice so that real surgeries have a much higher chance of being successful. Not only that, the inside organs of most dead bodies tend to look, feel and react just like those of the living, which makes the training even more realistic. In addition to that, cadavers can also be used to help one discover when and how an accident such as a place crash may have occurred. After talking to many doctors about the way they felt about operating on cadavers, they often had casual responses that did not directly address the issue of the difference between performing surgery on the dead as opposed to the living.

"A young cock whose head Dr. Kaau suddenly cut off...as he was running with great eagerness to his food, went on in a straight line 23 Rhinland feet, and would have gone further had he not met with an obstacle which stopped him." (Roach, 181)

"On the inside, H looks very much alive. You can see the pulse of her heartbeat in her liver, and all the way down her aorta. She bleeds where she is cut and her organs are plump and slippery-looking." (Roach, 169)

"Does it feel odd to perform surgery on someone who isn't alive?
His answer is surprising. 'The patient was alive.' I suppose surgeons are used to thinking about patients-particularly ones they've never met-as no more than what they see of them; open plots of organs." (Roach, 194)

One part about the text that I thought was funny (well not exactly "ha ha" funny) was the way that many of the doctors responded to being asked if they felt any discomfort about operating on people who are dead. The fact that these doctors are able to completely look past the fact that they are cutting into dead people while barely even (or not at all) acknowledging that these people are not alive is astonishing to me, and honestly just downright strange. After thinking about it for a little while, I guess it sort of makes sense though, because I believe one of the guest speakers we had for the illness and dying unit said that doctors are trained to not treat patients like normal human beings when it comes to operations in the first year of medical school. On the other hand, being objective during surgery seems completely different from not being phased by operating on dead people all the time.