Summary
The London Anatomy Office accepts around 350 human bodies donated for medical research and education annually. You may imagine that these bodies are presevered in chemicals for medical students to study over weeks and months. And some are. But many are used - almost fresh - to train surgeons in the procedures which may one day save your life.
Journalist Jenny Kleeman gains rare access to a surgical training course at Brighton and Sussex Medical School which uses these "fresh" donor bodies. She talks to the people who work with them every day and the surgeons who have come to be trained to find out how they feel about the people who have given the ultimate gift and if we still need real human cadavers in medical education.
Presenter: Jenny Kleeman Producer: Ella Hubber
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.7 | When they come in, they can come in in all different states. They come from funeral homes or |
| 0:46.4 | care homes or their home or hospitals. So it's just about taking their clothes off. We clean them. |
| 0:52.7 | We shave their hair, take their tags off, |
| 0:55.4 | so we take anything that has their name off them and, yeah, put them into the freezers. |
| 1:01.7 | I'm in a room surrounded by dead human bodies. They were sent here to Brighton and Sussex Medical |
| 1:09.1 | School shortly after their death. |
| 1:11.9 | Tomorrow, surgeons will use these bodies on a training course, |
| 1:16.1 | learning techniques that will save people who've suffered life-threatening injuries. |
| 1:20.9 | For the past five years, I've been exploring how and why people donate their bodies. |
| 1:27.5 | Why, in an age of virtual reality and 3D simulation, does medical science still need those |
| 1:33.7 | donations? |
| 1:35.1 | It's taken months of negotiation to be allowed in this room. |
| 1:39.5 | Camilla Ingram is the pro sector here. |
... |
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