The Benefits of Donating Your Body to Medical Science

Certainly something to consider!

"... In fact, almost 170 million Americans are registered organ donors, and people with specific medical conditions often donate their bodies for disease research. But giving your [whole] body to a medical school so that students can learn anatomy — the fundamental basis of medicine — is not an option you can check off while renewing your driver’s license. That may help explain why many institutions, including Columbia, are currently experiencing a body shortage.

This is an urgent problem, because for first-year medical students, a cadaver is the ultimate learning tool. “In a sense, that body is a student’s first patient,”  .. that regardless of the increasing sophistication of 3D computer models, there is no better teacher than the human body itself. “An actual body is obviously more realistic,” ...  “The artery or the nerves or the muscles might not look like they do in the textbook, so there’s an act of discovery that students have to do on their own.” ...

At Columbia [university], all first-year medical, dental, and physical-therapy students take a human dissection course, and the rewards of studying real bodies can’t be overstated. “For those who are going into surgery — which is a pretty good number of medical students here — it’s invaluable,” ... “They’re never going to have another opportunity to do a full-body dissection, where it’s OK to make mistakes.” Then there’s the human side: “You have to care for your cadaver and keep it properly covered. You have to make sure you’re being respectful.” ..."

The Benefits of Donating Your Body to Medical Science | Columbia Magazine Columbia’s Anatomical Donor Program gives students the education of a lifetime — and donors some posthumous perks.