Is that 4 bodies for the entire student body? How does that work?
There are 160-some students, broken into 20 groups of 8. 10 groups have lab at a time, for 2 hours each lab session. We have 3 lab sessions per week while anatomy is going on. Anatomy here is taught as an intensive 10-week course at the beginning of the first year.
There are 4 cadavers (plus some plastinated organs/limbs/etc from previous cadavers). Since they're prosected, the area of interest has already been exposed to a level where you can see everything you'll be tested on for that area. For example, this week we cover the thorax, so a couple of our anatomy professors had removed the heart and were dissecting the lung during my last session; they gave my group a little guided tour of the heart and lung as they were working.
Much of our time in lab is spent in our small groups working on ungraded lab exercises we're given to help us learn the material. Some days, though, we look at the cadavers, pointing out this structure or that structure with our anatomy atlas or our textbook as a reference. The professors are always there during lab sessions if we have any questions. With 10 groups and 4 cadavers, you might think it would be crowded, but it hasn't been a problem, partly because we can come into the lab to study pretty much anytime we want to. Plus, with prosection, it doesn't actually take much time to go through one particular area.
I've taken anatomy before, and think this is a pretty good way of doing things. I dissected animal organs in my old anatomy lab, though--never did cadaver dissection. One of my group-mates who did a SMP with gross anatomy including cadaver dissection says this way is much better... I'm told that dissection sounds cool until you spend 3 hours de-fatting a cadaver to get to what you were looking for. Not necessarily much learning going on while you're doing that.
I am glad we have cadavers, unlike the PBL programs up at Erie and Seton Hill... I do think you get a better idea of where the structures lie relative each other this way. I am not sad that we don't do dissection. Especially with our compressed schedule, we just wouldn't have the time.
Also, to reiterate, the cadaver lab is open to us whenever the med school building is open, so there's no shortage of opportunities to come in and learn from the cadavers.
Hope that answers whatever questions you might have.
