WISH-TV
Local high school students are getting a chance to do something that usually is not done until medical school: studying human cadavers.
Photo provided
The students attend Fishers and Hamilton Southeastern high schools and are taking anatomy and physiology or are enrolled in an EMT or CNT program.
This week, they’re spending their time out of the classroom and inside a lab at the Medical Academic Center in Carmel.
Some 150 students are studying human cadavers that have been donated to the facility.
The students are seeing with their own eyes the body parts, organs, tissues and nerves they have been learning about in their books.
They’re also learning about how the people they are studying lived and how they died.
“We know there’s a story behind each one so we know the age, the gender and most importantly, we like to know what the cause of death was,” said Brandon Cloud, who oversees experiential learning for Hamilton Southeastern Schools.
“We’ve got a 55-year-old man who died of lung cancer so the students can take a look at the lungs and see that it was caused by smoking and we have some details like that that are useful.”
“I think it’s a really good experience because we spend so much time talking about anatomy, physiology in class. But you can only imagine things, once you’re here you can when we got to see the heart and the lungs and we have two lobes on this side and three lobes on the other and you can actually see that and it’s not just on a textbook,” said Brooke Bilbrey.
The students will be spending the entire week studying the cadavers.