These results, together with other studies [14, 27, 32], reveal that the old-fashioned view that dissection is an emotionally challenging way to learn anatomy needs to be reconsidered.Dissection and light microscopy are, though, not free of handicaps. Storing human bodies is expensive, and other issues such as preservation and reduced suitability for dissection due to illness, elderly, or obesity selleckchem could be a problem; careful dissection is time-consuming, and light microscopes are expensive to maintain, especially nowadays where all that matters is funding basic molecular research while financing knowledge and training seems to be anachronistic and useless.

However, through performing dissection/prosection and light microscopy, students could learn the best about the surrounding tissues and structures while seeking a particular nerve or muscle; hands-on teaching with anatomic specimens is the first experience of the structural organization of the body and leads to a real understanding of the three-dimensional configuration of patients’ anatomy.Dissection has its obvious limitations, such as not being useful for teaching various important areas such as skeletal, nervous system anatomy or muscular anatomy in the contracted state. For these lectures, alternative tools would be required, such as cleaned and articulated skeletal models, radiological films, plastinated models, computer simulations, and Thiel-method embalmed bodies (see the following).

However, it is essential to provide students with the best evidence of biological variation: two individuals are not necessarily the same anatomically; as students wander from one body to the next in the dissecting room, they will see anatomical variation associated with developmental anomalies which often are common and of clinical importance.Nowadays, the availability of human specimens for dissection is likely to be derived from a homogeneous population, mainly donated bodies of the elderly, suffering from degenerative diseases, possibly causing the onset of bias and mistakes not representative of ��normality�� but rather representative of ��reality�� of the ongoing ageing of the whole population.Of note, plastination is a relatively new advancement in anatomy science, an effective technique of tissue preservation of entire organs or cross-sectional body slices [33], introduced by Von Hagens et al. [34, 35]; this technique uses polymers such as resin and silicone in order to create Cilengitide life-like specimens. Plastination, therefore, allows realistic visualization of anatomical concepts that are simply too difficult to describe while maintaining the bodies’ natural biological variance or pathology that, instead, plastic models lack.