ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the practice of learning anatomy in medical education classes. The following paragraphs are about the UK particularly, although much of what I say also applies to anatomy classes elsewhere. The dissection of cadaveric material to learn about the human body became a part of medical education in Europe from the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries onwards, spreading from Italy and then Paris. 1 For generations of medical students in Europe, the USA and elsewhere, anatomy has conjured up dissection, a term that helped to distinguish the practice from the mundane, from the vernacular of its etymological 'cutting'. The working objects of medical gross anatomy are human cadavers. The making and remaking of these cadavers as anatomical objects is an important theme in this chapter, and other points take shape around it.
