When the dead teach: Exploring the postvital life of cadavers in Danish dissection labs

This article follows the postvital lives of bodies donated to science, exploring their continuing material and social lives after the donor has died. I explore how the postmortem wishes of those who decide to donate their bodies to science intersect with the pedagogical aims of anatomical dissection. Using ethnographic fieldwork in three dissection labs in Denmark, I attend to the encounter between medical cadavers and medical students, asking how this encounter unfolds and what kind of enduring effects it might have. This is done through two steps. First I pay attention to the unresolvable ambiguity of medical cadavers, detailing three dimensions of ambiguity that have significant implications for the encounter between cadaver and student. Second I describe how medical students engage with this ambiguity, attempting to strike a balance between the inherent violence of dissection and the respect for the deceased that they are told to maintain. On the basis of this ethnographic attention to the rhythms and negotiations of the dissection lab, I argue that we may understand what goes on in dissection labs as a kind of ethics training in practice, where students are given a chance by donors to learn how to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity that will characterize their future engagements with human bodies, life, and death.