What It's Like Working With Dead Bodies

what's it like working with dead bodies this is a question we get all of the time so in today's video we're going to give you a behind-the-scenes look and discuss the basics of the embalming process as well as talk about how we take care of the cadavers and store them here in our lab now we're even going to talk about the dissection process and how we prep the bodies for our courses and our online content and even include a little bit about the story of these amazing body donors that donate their bodies to science and education which will include a little bit about what they passed away from so let's do this [Music] everybody wants to know about the embalming process it's probably one of the most if not the most asked question we get now here's the thing jonathan and i are not embalmers when we get the cadavers from the body donor program they are already involved but every single time we go to pick up a body jonathan i are always picking the brains of the embalmers because it's such a fascinating process so we've picked up a decent amount over the years but i am by no means an expert in terms of embalming but what i do know is that they're going to inject the embalming preservatives through a couple different places typically for our cadavers it's going to be in the carotid artery which is going to be in the neck or they could also go into the femoral artery which is going to be down towards the groin and they do this because of ease of access but what they're going to do is once they get into the artery they are then going to pump several different cocktails because there's a bunch of different chemicals i remember i asked the embalmer once i was like hey so what are what preservatives do you use because everyone always goes to formaldehyde the thing is for the preservation process that we get more that is used on these cadavers here formaldehyde is only used in the initial stages and not that much there's a whole slew of other chemicals which i'm not even going to attempt to vocalize them to here because i just don't know them but what's going to happen is they actually will decide which chemicals to use based on specific individuals but once they've come up with that they're going to do a multi-phase process i guess there's a decent way of saying it and they will inject the chemicals into the carotid artery or the femoral artery and pump them through and the reason why they're going into the cardiovascular system is because the fluids can then permeate and distribute throughout the entirety of the body the thing is the fluids got to go somewhere right there once they're in it's there's really nowhere to go after that so then they're going to have to drain the fluids out and that's when they're going to use what's called a trocar and trocar is just used to drain fluids and so what you'll see on the cadavers and you might see this this in some of our videos are what are known as trokar plugs so you can see one right here and this is just to plug up that hole that was created by the trocar in the removing or the removal process of those fluids but what you're essentially left with is you know sometimes people are off put when i say it like this but you're in a way left with a pickle right a pickled person because you have pumped right you've pumped the embalming fluid into the tissues into the body and then you've removed all the fluids and the blood comes with it so what you're left with is a preserved body that has textural and even color differences a lot of people will take note of the fact that the cadavers look yellow or the tissue looks forgive me for this a lot of people have said like boiled chicken i've heard that a lot a lot a lot but you have to understand the actual preservation process is going to change that texture and color so what you're seeing is not exactly representative of what it looks like say in you or i or in an unembalmed body but still the color and textural differences aren't so crazy that you can't learn anything so now that the cadavers are fully embalmed this is where jonathan and i actually come into the story so what we're gonna do is we will go to the body donor program and we will pick up the bodies and honestly there's really no better way to transport them outside of just a pickup truck and we do so respectfully but i mean we don't have we're not a mortuary so we don't have a specialized vehicle designed for this purpose so we'll place the bodies into the back of the pickup truck and transport them here to the lab from there we'll typically put the bodies onto a gurney and wheel them in which is always a spectacle for everyone else in the building as they're watching us just well transport a body into the building people typically say things like is that what i think it is and it's like yes that's exactly what you think it is but once we get them here into the lab that's where we kind of find a spot for them and you may have noticed if you've watched any of our videos for any length of time that sometimes the cadavers are in slightly different positions and locations and that's because as jonathan and i are filming or teaching physical labs sometimes we just need to move them around but typically they have their own little spots and that's just for i don't know it's it's easy for us to just understand where the cadavers are another extremely common question we get is how long can you keep the cadavers and the answer is well it depends it depends on the agreement that they had with the body donor program some bodies we can keep as long as 10 years and others we keep as little as two years now the difference there is whether they elected to go back to their families or to be what's known as a common burial body and i want to be very clear it's not as though we are you know dissecting the cadavers and then giving the body as is back to their family what we do with each cadaver is that we have their own separate container where every piece of tissue i'm talking like the tiniest piece of tissue that you can think of we keep it and we place it in that container and then what will happen is at the end of those two or ten years we will transport the body and the container back to the body donor program and all of it will be cremated at once and you'll be cremated regardless so whether or not your return to family or a common burial you're still going to be cremated if you're returned to family then the family obviously is going to get those cremated remains which is pretty awesome if you're a common burial body that just means you didn't want to go back to your family and then there is going to be a place that your remains can be placed at a local cemetery so really cool and interesting that way now another thing i also have to mention is sometimes people like there's no refrigeration like there's no freezer we're not dipping them into any kind of preservative the preservation process that is used that an embalming process that we discussed actually makes it so we can keep them and store them at room temperature all we need to do is make sure that they are wrapped in plastic but you'll also periodically see jonathan myself maybe in a video or especially if you're here in a lab spraying them down and we're spraying them down with a wetting agent that wetting agent is called phenoxyethanol so what you're really seeing is mainly water and a little bit of the alcohol in there but what that does is it helps hydrate the tissues and it's also antimicrobial to an extent that it helps prevents a fungus from taking over which is essential because as many of you who may have experienced in cadaver labs that's a big risk fungus can take over and that can completely destroy the cadaver and then you're gonna have to return them so uh but that's it we just spray them down with phenoxyethanol we typically will place a cloth on top of them kind of soak that in the phenoxy wrap them in plastic and then we can store them on the tables for again up to 10 years if that's the agreement we have but let's go ahead and now that we've figured out how we store them let's go ahead and talk about the dissection process so another thing we get a ton of questions on are how we prepare the body specifically around dissection like how do we get them to look the way that we do when people view them on the videos now the section can take a lot of time and we try to be as meticulous as possible so that students can see the various differences between neighboring structures and different tissues say like on a step dissection of the leg that can have multiple layers down from the skin all the way down to bony tissue now we use various tools during the process of dissection and some of these tools look like we might have bought them at a local hardware store like home depot or lowe's and frankly we did but others we bought a dissection kit from say like a medical company that provides dissection tools for cadaver labs now let's start with some of these power tools or just basically a saw we would use this to go through certain bone structures now this tends to be a little bit better for that but in some cases if we're dissecting a limb or removing a limb we might actually use a certain type of a saw to actually go through that bone now the dremel is a lot of different stuff that you can use if i was going to actually do little holes in bone tissue or hollow out cavities in bone tissue for people to see like a medullary cavity and a tibia or shin bone we use dremel tools for various types of things like that now the things that i use the most are the actual true dissection tools this is actual a teaser needle i call it the poker but technically called the teaser needle you would use this to tease out small little structures like small nerves to separate them from the surrounding tissues obviously there's going to be a scalpel here this is the scalpel handle technically in the scalpel in its package people are surprised how much you actually don't use the scalpel when you get into the heart of dissection no pun intended but when you're doing a lot of dissection you end up using forceps which a lot of people just refer to as tweezers and i use the scissors a lot and i don't actually use the scissors to cut a ton i actually will go through and tease the tissue out and insert the tip of the scissors in and then spread the tissue apart so that we can separate one layer from another now the hemostats are always very helpful when you need to put tension on tissue you can clamp down and pull a structure away in order to put tension on it when you are using the scalpel or those other dissection tools that i just mentioned now one of the more surprising dissection tools that we have in the lab is the bandsaw now we don't use bandsaw to be barbaric but the band saw provides an invaluable tool to help us separate the bodies into different planes of space such as cutting the body in the sagittal plane or maybe even in the frontal or horizontal plane that allows students to view internal anatomy that you couldn't do in any other way especially students who may be going into something say like radiology if you've ever seen a ct or an mri it slices the body through the sagittal plane through the frontal plane and even in that horizontal plane so that students or in that case radiologists can view the body in multiple different planes of space to help diagnose conditions and to view abnormalities and now we're going to take a look at all of the bodies that we have in the lab and discuss what they passed away from as well as some of the surprises or anatomical abnormalities that we found through the process of dissection this cadaver here is simultaneously our youngest and our oldest cadaver in the lab that's because this individual passed away in his mid to late 60s meaning that's how he's the youngest individual we have but we've had him since december 2012 so it's like eight and a half years which means he's the oldest that we have out of all the cadavers now we get very little information about these individuals and that's for anonymity purposes it's just kind of easier for us to know really we don't really need to know too much you just basically know their age and essentially what they pass from we don't get a complex medical background so what we know about this individual is that again he's in his mid 60s mid late 60s but passed away from colorectal cancer now one of the most interesting finds that we found with him was that he suffered a ruptured achilles at some point in his life so that was pretty wild to see and jonathan even talked about that in a previous video this particular body is one of our newer bodies so we haven't done any dissection yet however this is a female that died of alzheimer's disease in her late 70s so we're extremely excited to explore the brain anatomy as well as take a look at any other anatomical abnormalities that the body may have this is another one of our newest additions here in the lab which means that we haven't really began the dissection process but what we do know about this individual is that he was in his early 80s and passed away from cardiac arrest although we do also know that he suffered from copd as well as liver disease so we're pretty excited to see those if we can see much at all once we begin the dissection process this individual is our oldest by age she passed away in her early 90s mostly from natural causes but we did get some information that she had the early signs of dementia we were extremely excited to pick up this body because we had a pretty good idea that she still had the uterus the ovaries the uterine tube so we could teach female reproductive anatomy and she's been featured in a lot of our youtube videos to help people be more educated about that particular anatomy this next individual passed away in his early 80s from a stroke now we haven't gotten to his brain yet but that's because we've been primarily focusing on doing muscular dissections and during that process of dissecting we discovered that he suffered during his lifetime an inguinal hernia and in fact we even did an entire video all about it now this next body might be a little misleading because it actually kind of looks like two bodies but it is one body that we cut through the sagittal plane now remember i discussed the bandsaw and the dissection process and we don't do this to be barbaric this is to help students learn internal anatomy and get different perspectives of how the human body is put together if you've ever seen ct scans or mris they often will slice up the body through imaging so people can look at different anatomical structures so extremely relevant to medicine now this particular body died mid-80s again from breast cancer we also found some very interesting things like a really large cystic ovary that we theorize possibly was due to pcos this next individual in reality is our oldest cadaver and that's because we've had him for approaching 10 years now and he was also passed down to us from another instructor who taught using this fetus in the classroom for around 30 years so bare minimum 40 years we actually did an entire video where jonathan went into detail about possible gestational age but he also discussed that we actually don't understand the circumstances surrounding the death but one thing we do know is that in the death of this young individual here he's been able to teach at this point now millions across the entire world and finally jeffrey the skeleton jeffrey is the one we know the least about but he was donated to us from another school and based on the pelvic measurements that we did we can assume mail now some other questions we often get about jeffrey the skeleton is why is he painted in red and blue colors and this is because these are signifying or representing muscle attachments where one muscle attaches to one bone to the other so we can understand how muscles mobilize the joints now jeffrey's been a lot of our youtube videos as well as instagram and tick tock and he'll continue to make these cameos in all of our future videos thanks for watching and going on this behind the scenes tour with us and again we want to take a second to say thank you to all those who donate their bodies to science we could not do this without this amazing anatomical gift and now we're able to educate millions of people across the country frankly across the world and so thank you again to these amazing people who donate their bodies to science and it wouldn't be one of our videos if we weren't adding shameless plugs at the end but i do want to say that it's not entirely shameless and that's because if you do like comment subscribe those things actually help with engagement and make the videos perform better so that they can or we can continue to educate more and more people and also you'll notice we have some anatomical artwork on the back wall if you want to find the link in the description you can purchase some of that and that too goes to support in the channel so that would be much appreciated but thank you for listening to our shameless plug and we'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Institute of Human Anatomy

Views: 3,234,573

Keywords: body donation, embalming, human cadavers, human anatomy, what happens to body donors, breast cancer, inguinal hernia, colorectal cancer, ruptured achilles, pcos, alzheimers disease, uterus, ovary, ovaries, trocar, formaldehyde, mortuary science

Id: fuL9RmHEGUY

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021