Attitudes of medical and dental students to dissection

Guy's, King's, and St. Thomas's School of Medicine encourages students to learn anatomy from human dissection. Today, there is a worldwide move of anatomy-based teaching away from dissection to prosection. This study investigates how attitudes toward dissection vary with gender and ethnicity. We assessed students' reactions and concerns regarding the dissecting room, any coping strategies they use to combat them, and analyzed effective methods of teaching anatomy to medical and dental students. Three questionnaires were distributed amongst 474 first-year medical and dental students before dissection and I week and 12 weeks after exposure to the dissecting room. Over the 3 months we found significant changes in the concerns of students about dissection. There were also significant differences (P < 0.05) between medical and dental students, males and females, and students of differing ethnic backgrounds, which persisted over 12 weeks. Both medical and dental students found tutorials and textbooks of most value in learning anatomy. Dental students found prosection more useful than medical students (P < 0.001) though neither group demonstrated a significant preference for prosection over dissection. Of concern, 7% reported recurring images of cadavers and 2% insomnia after commencing dissection. Interest in the subject matter and discussion were the commonest methods used to combat stress. This study contributes to the ongoing debate about the value of the dissecting room in the medical school curriculum.