Why India's medical schools are running low on bodies

Medical students in India are missing out on a crucial rite of passage because of a lack of dead bodies, or cadavers, for them to learn from.

Logistical issues and cultural sensitivities mean the world's "most populous country" is "running low on bodies", said The Independent, forcing medical schools to adopt anatomical models or digital simulations for training instead.

A complex interplay

Cadaver dissection is "a must" for first-year medical students, Dr Kumari T K, a professor with the Department of Anatomy at Azeezia Medical College in Kollam, told the New Indian Express (NIE), because medicine and anatomy "cannot be learnt through theories".

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But instead of the required rate of one cadaver for 10 medical students, India is thought only to have one cadaver for every 50 students in some colleges.

Reasons for the shortage include "cultural, religious and logistical hurdles" and a "lack of awareness", experts told The Independent. Beliefs around death and the afterlife "complicate the picture" because many families want to perform religious rites soon after death and fear that donating the body to science would delay both that and a sense of closure as they grieve.

Even when the deceased person wished to donate his or her body to medical science, the family sometimes "gives more priority to the emotional aspect", Rejeesh Rehman told NIE. He donated the body of his father for medical studies but said many other families prefer to organise their relative's funeral in line with "religious beliefs" and therefore "may not allow to donate the body".

This cadaver shortage is not limited to India. The Times reported in March that, "faced with a dwindling supply of fresh bodies to train on", British medical schools were resorting to dealing with the US, where cadavers can be "supplied for profit by anyone", regardless of training or expertise, without any federal laws being broken.

No substitute 

Medical schools the world over have, for the past 10 years, been experimenting with ways of teaching anatomy without a body, replacing real cadavers with virtual ones. And the Covid pandemic meant many schools had no choice but to use them.

Physical cadaver labs are expensive to run, radiology professor Mark Griswold of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, told Slate. It can also be difficult to see some anatomy, such as lymph nodes, the pancreas, and some blood vessels on a physical cadaver. The use of virtual cadavers "standardises the process", added Marc J Khan, the dean of Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, meaning all students are working with the same type of 'body'.

But the virtual experience isn't the same, anatomist and cadaver-donation advocate Dr Vaishaly Bharambe told The Independent. Although they provide a "study in three dimensions", virtual bodies "cannot ever replace the feel of a real human being". And there is no technology “that will allow you to imagine what different organs inside a person feel like".