A white floor gleams under florescent lights. The faint scent of chemicals hangs in the air, which is quiet and goosebump-cold. Rows of stainless steel boxes, their edges hard and angular, fill the sweeping room like lines of soldiers in a parade.

“Now,” a white-coated instructor announces, “go ahead and open your tanks.”

Steel clips snap and clatter. Metal hinges creak. Zippers buzz as slick white bags open, and the room’s austerity falls away.

Fuzzy ecru shrouds emerge, skimming organic silhouettes — no two the same. Some figures’ barrel-chests rise high above the tables, their height filling the space end-to-end. Others are slight, with space on the table to spare. Removing shrouds reveals limbs that are lean and atrophied, soft and full or bulging with muscles. Scars, tattoos and even pink nail polish hint at the humans who inhabited these bodies in life and willingly donated them in death.

“Their gift allows our students to learn in an irreplaceable way,” said Andrew Pirotte, M.D., associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and a graduate of the KU School of Medicine. “These willing people served as some of my greatest teachers.”

At the KU School of Medicine, required human cadaver dissection helps forge future doctors’ professional identities in ways textbooks and technology can’t. The university has invested millions in a state-of-the-art anatomy lab and a newly renovated morgue, and its robust willed body program is the sole source of donor bodies for the entire state of Kansas. Even as some medical schools have abandoned human dissection for new technologies, KU students, teachers and physicians say, for them, anatomy lab is non-negotiable.

The success of KU’s program is scaffolded by deliberate measures to preserve the dignity of donors, foster empathy in students and spark awe at the intricacy of the human body.

“It’s a powerful thing to hold in your hands lungs that once breathed and a heart that once beat,” said Morgan Bretches, a third-year medical student at KU’s Wichita campus.

Bretches expected anatomy lab to solidify her knowledge of the human body. She didn’t expect the humility, reverence and gratitude that suddenly washed over her one day early in the course. She vows to apply those lessons in her career.

“In that moment I felt the weight of responsibility,” Bretches said. “Not just to learn, but to honor. To carry their legacy into every patient I’ll meet. To remember that behind every body is a life, a story, a person who mattered.”

In contrast to the high-tech developments rescripting so much of the medical field today, using human dissection to train doctors has been relied on since the 14th century.

Obtaining bodies historically depended on unsavory practices — from using corpses of executed criminals to grave-robbing, overwhelmingly targeting marginalized groups. While 20th century legislation provided oversight for body acquisition practices, ethically disputed areas remain.

A few have been publicized recently, such as the case of a Texas institution that supplied its medical school and for-profit companies with unclaimed bodies from Dallas-Fort Worth. Following a journalistic investigation and public outcry in 2024, the school stopped the practice.

Autonomy is the first guiding principal for human body donation programs, according to the American Association for Anatomy. The group’s best practices state, “The use of an informed process for consent to body donation and the use of an individual’s remains after death is as important as consent to research on the living.”

Compared to the darkest days of cadaver acquisition, prioritizing the dignity of people who gifted their bodies is a new development, and an important one for universities.

DAY 1: Observation and empathy

Black tattoos — faded and blurred — on one man’s left scapula and deltoid.

They must symbolize something that was important to him in life. Did he serve in the military? Belong to a motorcycle club? 

A pair of feet missing all 10 toes.

Was this a person living with the scars of advanced diabetes? Did it prevent her from being able to walk?

A horizontal scar on a woman’s lower abdomen.

Had she undergone a hysterectomy? Or was she a mother who delivered by cesarean-section?

On their first day of two semesters in the anatomy lab, first-year medical students unveil the donated bodies they will dissect. They begin by observing and contemplating, setting the tone for KU’s human dissection curriculum.

Students are told only their donor’s age, gender and cause of death but no personal information. Some name their donors after significant people in their life like a grandparent or a memorable patient they encountered while shadowing, said Sarah Keim, Ph.D., director of the medical center’s gross anatomy lab in Kansas City and a professor of surgery.

Keim also lays out lab rules.

Photography is prohibited. Workstations are expected to be kept clean. Shrouds should remain in place while students are working on other parts of the body. Tools are to be laid on trays, as would be expected with a real patient. Language must be professional.

Second-year medical student Isabelle Parisi recalled the moment she viewed her first donor.

“Look at this body who used to be a living person,” she remembers Keim instructing. “What do you see? Do you see any surgical scars? Do you see any lesions? Do you see any stretch marks? Do you see callouses? Are certain parts of their bodies stronger than others? What can you tell of the way this person lived that imprinted on their body after death?”

Parisi and her tankmates noticed their donor had extremely atrophied legs — though his upper body was strong. They surmised he was a wheelchair user yet still able to get around by pushing his chair with his arms.

Parisi took to heart the idea that this man was her first patient, a concept shared by many in the medical field.

“You are working with a human body, and to me that is very impactful and important. There’s no replacing that,” Parisi said. “It really is a privilege.”

Feel the intricacy

Students in their second semester of anatomy lab have just finished removing skin from a leg. Gloved hands glide over exposed muscles. Fingertips feel elevation changes and texture differences between each anatomical element of the calf.

“I can’t find it,” one student says, searching for the precise location in the gastrocnemius — notably not the soleus, a muscle one layer deeper in the leg — into which she’s supposed to inject a colorfully dyed substance. It’s practice for administering an anti-spasticity medication.

Their instructor steps into the small circle of students and reaches in. His own hand guides them to the spot, and they take aim with the syringe. Over the next couple hours, as the students get deeper into their dissection of the leg, they’ll see whether their neon green dye hit its mark.

“You’re not going to be able to cut into the patients that you treat to find the right spot,” points out M. Scott Draper, D.O., a fourth-year resident in physical medicine and rehabilitation and adjunct anatomy faculty member who teaches the lab. “You need to be able to feel.”

Not everyone agrees that human dissection is critical for medical students or worth the expense of building and operating cadaver labs. Some anatomists point out that the embalming process stiffens tissue and washes out natural color that would be seen inside a living human. Also, certain body parts can be difficult to access intact, especially by novice dissectors.

Some new United States medical schools have launched with cadaver-less curriculums, including New York University Long Island School of Medicine, the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and the Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Wichita. They use combinations of virtual or augmented reality and plastinated cadavers and specimens to teach anatomy.

A few long-established medical schools have pivoted their focus. New York University Grossman School of Medicine abandoned student cadaver dissection in 2019 but still provides prosected and plastinated specimens. Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine students complete a two-week dissection intensive, but the majority of their anatomy training is through virtual reality headsets using the HoloAnatomy application, a technology created at Case Western. Case Western does offer an advanced elective in which students complete a full-body dissection.

Despite the downsides of dissection, KU instructors emphasize that while textbooks and even virtual reality show examples of ideal human anatomy, few real humans mirror that.

Actual muscles aren’t color-coded like a diagram. Nor are they 2-D. They overlap, with some on the surface and others deep inside the body. They’re entwined with blood vessels, ligaments, tendons, bones and nerves. Seeing them is helpful; touching them is invaluable.

In undergrad, second-year medical student Halle Arnold learned well with lectures and pictures. When she began medical school, she assumed she’d learn the same way. When it came to anatomy that wasn’t the case.

Arnold was surprised by how “clarifying” her dissection lab was. Identifying anatomical structures and practicing medical procedures on real human bodies has increased her confidence.

“They’re not ever just like the textbook,” she said. “I know, in theory, that this artery runs next to this muscle, but those are just words in my head until I actually see it. I always leave lab with a better understanding of the content then when I came in.”

Some donor bodies hold surprises, additional reminders of health issues they experienced in life.

At one table, students dissecting their donor’s arm notice wires leading to a pacemaker embedded near his left clavicle. His scar must’ve been faint enough they didn’t see it initially. They enlist Cameron Schenk, gross anatomy lab manager, to help remove the metal device, roughly the size of a pocket watch.

There’s a drawer in the anatomy lab full of pacemakers. Schenk said students have discovered everything from chemotherapy ports to breast implants, and a lot of hip replacements.

“A book or virtual reality teaches you what normal anatomy is, but the cadaver will show you that it’s not normal,” said Schenk. “There’s so much variation.”

A rarer find emerges as one group of students finds a thick wire running along their donor’s spine. They summon Draper, who is wowed. He identifies the wire as an electrode from a stimulator implanted to relieve pain using electrical impulses. He deftly cuts away tissue, searching for the device that should connect to the wires, but it’s not where it should be — at least not anymore.

Did this woman live with back pain severe enough to warrant such an intervention? Was the stimulator removed because it failed to help her?

Teamwork and grit

“Does everybody remember how to turn a donor to a prone position?” Draper questions students preparing for their next dissection unit.

The key point here? It’s a team effort. Sometimes a two-team effort. There are eight students assigned to each donor for the semester; they alternate days in the lab so on any given day there are four students around each table.

At Draper’s suggestion, students from one table step over to help their neighbors turn their donor. Then the other table reciprocates.

Camaraderie runs high in the anatomy lab. Instructors in white coats move from table to table, reaching gloved fingers beneath veins, around muscles and into adipose tissue to reveal anatomical structures for students’ less-trained eyes. Occasional awkward laughs punctuate the chatter. Even students in their second semester of anatomy lab are stretching their comfort zone. Dissection is messy. And it’s physically difficult work.

By the time students begin dissecting the fortress-like structure of the spinal column, difficulty is on full display. Students gradually expose and then remove a section of spinous processes, the bony protrusions on the backbone.

Draper draws his finger up and down the trench left behind, where a shiny, smooth highway of tissue runs the length of the spine, enthusiastically explaining, “That’s the posterior longitudinal ligament.”

Successfully revealing the wonders of the human body also requires soft skills like teamwork, grit and resilience.

“Anatomy is hard. There’s a large volume of information to learn and review. Dissection is challenging,” Keim said.

“You need to divide up your roles within the team. Coming prepared, helping each other work through emotions or dissection techniques, resolving conflicts, leaning on peers and asking for help when needed are all things students learn in the anatomy lab.”

Facing death

Prior to students practicing injections into arm muscles, Draper shares a tip for locating the flexor digitorum superficialis, which helps flex the fingers. Face a classmate, placing your hands palm-to-palm. Where your middle fingertip lands on their inner forearm is where the injection should go.

Doing this with a fellow student was one thing for Parisi. The gesture of essentially holding hands with a deceased person was another.

“My heart started pounding,” Parisi said, describing her unexpected visceral reaction. “I pulled my hand away. After I got over that moment I was able to do it correctly.”

Parisi had not experienced the same unease on the first day of lab, though that’s when it occurs for many students. No one knows quite how they will react emotionally or physically until they’re there.

Someone faints every year, Keim said. Most students are timid and hesitant, yet curious. Some grapple with their personal moral or religious views. Some step outside the room and cry.

“There’s definitely some emotional processing going on,” Keim said.

That’s the foundation for another category of lessons learned in anatomy lab: developing empathy and compassion for the living, as well as comfort facing the inevitable — death.

Arnold said one of her tablemates was especially emotional on the first day of anatomy lab. She herself worked through queasiness at times during the dissection process.

She was grateful that the lab leaders understood this was part of the process.

“It felt reassuring,” she said, “to know that the whole spectrum of feelings were valid.”

Willing teachers

For students who struggle emotionally, instructors remind them that these people wanted to be here. They wanted their bodies to teach others.

KU’s body bequeathal process is voluntary, in writing, and must be completed by the individual themselves or, in some cases, their next of kin.

In recent history the program has received 200 to almost 300 bodies per year, said Barth Wright, Ph.D., director of KU’s Willed Body Program and a professor of surgery. It’s typically enough that KU can fulfill the needs of all its students and then some.

More than 20 educational institutions outside the university rely on KU to obtain donor bodies and specimens for their nursing and other healthcare education programs. If supply allows, KU’s Willed Body Program also provides donor bodies to institutions in neighboring states including the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Rockhurst University and the University of Nebraska.

The program does not accept some bodies. That includes those that are simply too large or tall to fit in the anatomy lab tanks, or bodies that have undergone autopsies. Organ removal may also disqualify donors, because transporting embalming fluid through the body requires most systems to be intact. Finally, people with certain infections may be disqualified, as those could pose a risk to students.

At KU Medical Center, in addition to the first- and second-year medical students’ curriculum, donor bodies are used in dissection labs for physical therapy, athletic training, nurse anesthetist and respiratory therapy. A small number of bodies are soft-embalmed using chemicals other than formaldehyde or are fresh-frozen. Those are used to train specialties requiring more lifelike human tissue for practicing skills such as surgery or, for military-track students, on-field combat procedures.

Finally, in some cases specimens or tissues from the donors are used for research, Wright said. That might be large-scale studies of brains or legs, for example.

“Every individual counts,” Wright said. “That data is irreplaceable.”

State-of-the-art facilities

In addition to those standard fluorescent overhead lights, windows spanning the length of two entire walls bathe KU’s expansive, state-of-the-art anatomy lab in natural light.

Thanks to a $7.2 million project completed in 2020, KU replaced its old anatomy lab with a new 4,800-square-foot facility on the fourth floor of Orr-Major Hall. It features 30 dissection tables with overhead surgical lights and digital monitors where students can display instructions and diagrams as they work. Two teaching stations have cameras to record demonstrations and stream to other monitors throughout the lab. Each dissection table has its own downdraft system, and the lab ventilation system circulates the air in the room every four minutes. A cold storage area provides easy access to soft cadavers and dissected anatomical structures for specialty training. There are even adjacent locker rooms.

“I’ve been in a lot of different anatomy labs,” Wright said. “They tend to be in basements, they tend to not have windows, they tend to not have very good ventilation. There are a lot of them that are not nearly as pleasant.”

KU School of Medicine-Wichita students soon will take class in a brand-new anatomy lab at the Wichita Biomedical Campus, slated to open to students in fall 2027. The planned 2,500-square-foot lab includes 12 dissection tables and the latest lighting, ventilation and audio-visual technology. Currently KU medical students in Wichita share the cadaver lab at Newman University.

KU School of Medicine-Salina, where eight medical students enroll per year, has a right-sized anatomy lab with three dissection tables. Two are for first- and second-year medical students, and one is available when needed for clerkships.

Working behind the scenes to supply the entire program is the KU Medical Center morgue, newly reopened in 2025 following a $2 million renovation.

When a person who has bequeathed their body to KU dies, they are brought here, embalmed here and stored here. They are then moved to the anatomy lab or driven to other institutions. Once their body has served its educational role, they are returned and cremated here.

The embalming area is brightly lit, with shiny white floors. The hum and heat of the crematory is contained in its own dedicated room. A loading area opens to a newly covered dock, which protects transport vehicles from the elements.

The storage room can accommodate over 80 donor bodies, including freezer space for 16. On one side, embalmed donors inside zippered bags lie atop metal trays on tall shelves, waiting to be used. On the other, cardboard and wooden containers hold donors ready to be cremated. A mechanical lift runs on a ceiling track the length of the room.

Each shiny white bag is affixed with a bright red tag bearing the donor’s designated number, which remains attached to them throughout their time with KU’s program.

To protect privacy, the number is only linked to a name in the Willed Body Program computer system, which tracks the current location of every donor. The number is written on each bag or box into which the donor is moved. It’s engraved on a metal coin affixed to the donor from the lab into the crematory, where it’s sifted out to confirm the correct person’s ashes are returned to their family.

“We do things here as we would at a funeral home,” said Mike McClenahan, the KU Medical Center embalmer and crematory operator. “So, people can rest assured that these were the steps taken to ensure that this was their loved one.”

Bodies as gifts

Numerous current physicians and medical students alike can describe a single moment in anatomy lab where the gravity of their chosen career hit them.

For Pirotte, the emergency medicine professor, it was after struggling through textbook passages and digital diagrams of the heart. The material wasn’t sticking. But when he and his dissection lab partner held their donor’s heart in their hands, everything was vivid.

“It was an incredible moment in my education. I can see it even now — 18 years later,” Pirotte said. He also realized that it was a human willing to donate their body, an “unexpected teacher,” that enabled his understanding.

Bretches, the third-year medical student, said she’s inspired to emulate that generosity for her future patients, especially as she plans to go into oncology.

“This donor’s final act was not just a gift to me,” she said. “It was a reminder of what medicine must be: a practice rooted not just in science but in grace, in the willingness to show up for others even when we have nothing left to offer but ourselves.”