Jonathan: What's it like working with dead bodies?
Justin: This is a question we get all of the time. So, in today's video,
we're going to give you a behind-the-scenes look and discuss the basics of the embalming
process as well as talk about how we take care of the cadavers and store them here in our lab.
Jonathan: Now, we're even going to talk about the dissection process and how we
prep the bodies for our courses and our online content and even include a little bit about
the story of these amazing body donors that donate their bodies to science and education,
which will include a little bit about what they passed away from. So - Justin: Let's do this!
[Intro] Justin:
Everybody wants to know about the embalming process. It's probably one of the most if
not the most asked question we get. Now here's the thing - Jonathan and I are not
embalmers... When we get the cadavers from the body donor program, they are
already embalmed, but every single time we go to pick up a body, Jonathan and I are
always picking the brains of the embalmers because it's such a fascinating process.
So, we've picked up a decent amount over the years but I am by no means an expert in terms of
embalming, but what I do know is that they're going to inject the embalming preservatives
through a couple different places. Typically for our cadavers, it's going to be in the
carotid artery which is going to be in the neck or they could also go into the femoral
artery which is going to be down towards the groin, and they do this because of ease of
access. But what they're going to do is once they get into the artery, they are
then going to pump several different cocktails - because there's a bunch of different chemicals.
I remember I asked the embalmer once I was like "Hey, so what are - what
preservatives do you use?" because everyone always goes to formaldehyde. The thing is,
for the preservation process that we get more that is used on these cadavers here, formaldehyde is
only used in the initial stages and not that much. There's a whole slew of other chemicals which I’m
not even going to attempt to vocalize them to you here because I just don't know them, but what's
going to happen is they actually will decide which chemicals to use based on specific individuals.
But once they've come up with that, they're going to do a multi-phase process - I guess
there's a decent way of saying it, and they will inject the chemicals into the carotid artery or
the femoral artery and pump them through. And the reason why they're going into the cardiovascular
system is because the fluids can then permeate and distribute throughout the entirety of the body.
The thing is, the fluids got to go somewhere, right? Once they're in,
there's really nowhere to go after that, so then they're going to have to drain
the fluids out and that's when they're going to use what's called a "trocar",
and trocar is just used to drain fluids. And so, what you'll see on the cadavers, and you might see
this in some of our videos are what are known as trocar plugs. So, you can see one right here.
And this is just to plug up that hole that was created by the trocar in the removing
or the removal process of those fluids. But what you're essentially left with
is you know, sometimes people are off put when I say it like this but you're in a way left with a
pickle, right? A pickled person because you have pumped, right? You've pumped the embalming fluid
into the tissues - into the body and then you've removed all the fluids and the blood comes with
it so what you're left with is a preserved body that has textural and even color differences.
A lot of people will take note of the fact that the cadavers look
yellow or the tissue looks (forgive me for this), a lot of people have said like boiled chicken,
I've heard that a lot, a lot, a lot. But you have to understand,
the actual preservation process is going to change that texture and color. So, what you're seeing is
not exactly representative of what it looks like say in you or I or in an unembalmed body
but still the color and textural differences aren't so crazy that you can't learn anything.
So, now that the cadavers are fully embalmed, this is where Jonathan and
I actually come into the story. So what we're gonna do is we will go to the body
donor program and we will pick up the bodies and honestly there's really no better way to
transport them outside of just a pickup truck. And we do so respectfully but I mean, we don't
have - we're not a mortuary so we don't have a specialized vehicle designed for this purpose.
So, we'll place the bodies into the back of the pickup truck and transport them here to the lab.
From there, we'll typically put the bodies onto a gurney and wheel them in - which is
always a spectacle for everyone else in the building as they're watching us just - well,
transport a body into the building. People typically say things like "Is that
what I think it is?" and it's like "Yes, that's exactly what you think it is".
But once we get them here into the lab, that's where we kind of find a spot for them. And you
may have noticed if you've watched any of our videos for any length of time that sometimes the
cadavers are in slightly different positions and locations and that's because as Jonathan
and I are filming or teaching physical labs sometimes, we just need to move them around.
But typically they have their own little spots and that's just for - I
don't know - it's easy for us to just understand where the cadavers are.
Another extremely common question we get is "How long can you keep the cadavers?" and the answer
is - well it depends. It depends on the agreement that they had with the body donor program.
Some bodies we can keep as long as 10 years and others we keep as little as two years.
Now, the difference there is whether they elected to go back to their families or to
be what's known as a common burial body. And I want to be very clear - it's not as though we are
you know, dissecting the cadavers and then giving the body as is back to their family.
What we do with each cadaver is that we have their own separate container where
every piece of tissue - I’m talking like the tiniest piece of tissue that you can think of,
we keep it and we place it in that container and then what will happen
is at the end of those two or ten years, we will transport the body and the container back to the
body donor program and all of it will be cremated at once. And you'll be cremated regardless... So,
whether or not you are returned to family or a common burial, you're still going to be cremated.
If you're returned to family, then the family obviously is going to get those
cremated remains which is pretty awesome. If you're a common burial body, that just
means you didn't want to go back to your family and then there is going to be a place that your
remains can be placed at a local cemetery. So, really cool and interesting that way.
Now, another thing I also have to mention is sometimes people like there's no refrigeration,
like there's no freezer, we're not dipping them into any kind of preservative - the preservation
process that is used, that embalming process that we discussed actually makes it so we can keep them
and store them at room temperature. All we need to do is make sure that they are wrapped in plastic,
but you'll also periodically see Jonathan, myself maybe in a video or - especially if
you're here in a lab spraying them down and we're spraying them down with a wetting agent.
That wetting agent is called phenoxyethanol. So, what you're really seeing is mainly water
and a little bit of alcohol in there but what that does is it helps hydrate the tissues and it's also
antimicrobial to an extent that it helps prevents a fungus from taking over which is essential
because as many of you who may have experienced in cadaver labs, that's a big risk. Fungus can
take over and that can completely destroy the cadaver and then you're gonna have to return them.
So, uh, but that's it. We just spray them down with phenoxyethanol, we typically will place a
cloth on top of them - kind of soak that in the phenoxy, wrap them in plastic and then
we can store them on the tables for again, up to 10 years if that's the agreement we have.
Let's go ahead and - now that we've figured out how we store them,
let's go ahead and talk about the dissection process.
Jonathan: So, another thing, we get a ton of questions on how we prepare the body
specifically around dissection. Like how do we get them to look the way that we do when people
view them on the videos. Now, dissection can take a lot of time and we try to be as
meticulous as possible so that students can see the various differences between
neighboring structures and different tissues say like on a step dissection of the leg that
can have multiple layers down from the skin all the way down to bony tissue.
Now, we use various tools during the process of dissection and some of these tools look
like we might have bought them at a local hardware store like Home Depot or Lowe's and
frankly we did, but others we bought a dissection kit from say like
a medical company that provides dissection tools for cadaver labs.
Now, let's start with some of these power tools or just basically a saw.
We would use this to go through certain bone structures. Now, this tends to be
a little bit better for that but in some cases if we're dissecting a limb or removing a limb,
we might actually use a certain type of a saw to actually go through that bone.
Now, the Dremel is a lot of different stuff that you can use. If I was going to actually do
little holes in bone tissue or hollow out cavities in bone tissue for people to see like a medullary
cavity and a tibia or shin bone we use Dremel tools for various types of things like that.
Now, the things that I use the most are the actual true dissection tools.
This is actual a teaser needle - I call it the poker but technically called the teaser needle.
You would use this to tease out small little structures like small nerves
to separate them from the surrounding tissues. Obviously there's going to be
a scalpel here. This is the scalpel handle technically and the scalpel in its package.
People are surprised how much you actually don't use the scalpel when you get into
the heart of dissection - no pun intended, but when you're doing a lot of dissection,
you end up using forceps, which a lot of people just refer to as tweezers
and I use the scissors a lot. And I don't actually use the scissors to cut a ton,
I actually will go through and tease the tissue out and insert the tip of
the scissors in and then spread the tissue apart so that we can separate one layer from another.
Now the hemostats are always very helpful when you need to put tension on tissue. You can clamp down
and pull a structure away in order to put tension on it when
you are using the scalpel or those other dissection tools that I just mentioned.
Now, one of the more surprising dissection tools that we have in the lab
is the band saw. Now, we don't use the band saw to be barbaric but the band saw provides
an invaluable tool to help us separate the bodies into different planes of space
such as cutting the body in the sagittal plane or maybe even in the frontal or horizontal
plane. That allows students to view internal anatomy that you couldn't do in any other way,
especially students who may be going into something say like radiology.
If you've ever seen a CT or an MRI, it slices the body through the sagittal plane,
through the frontal plane and even in that horizontal plane
so that students or in that case, radiologists can view the body
in multiple different planes of space to help diagnose conditions and to view abnormalities.
And now we're going to take a look at all of the bodies that we have in the
lab and discuss what they passed away from as well as some of the
surprises or anatomical abnormalities that we found through the process of dissection.
Justin: This cadaver here is simultaneously our youngest and our oldest cadaver in the
lab. That's because this individual passed away in his mid to late 60s,
meaning that's how he's the youngest individual we have, but we've had him since December 2012, so
it's like eight and a half years which means he's the oldest that we have out of all the cadavers.
Now, we get very little information about these individuals
and that's for anonymity purposes. It's just kind of easier for us to know
really - we don't really need to know too much. You just basically know their age
and essentially what they passed from. We don't get a complex medical background.
So, what we know about this individual is that again, he's in his mid 60s - mid late 60s but
passed away from colorectal cancer. Now, one of the most interesting finds that we found with him
was that he suffered a ruptured achilles at some point in his life. So that was
pretty wild to see and Jonathan even talked about that in a previous video.
Jonathan: This particular body is one of our newer bodies. So,
we haven't done any dissection yet. However, this is a female that died of Alzheimer’s
disease in her late 70s. So, we're extremely excited to explore the brain anatomy as well
as take a look at any other anatomical abnormalities that the body may have.
Justin: This is another one of our newest additions here in the lab which means that we
haven't really began the dissection process, but what we do know about this individual
is that he was in his early 80s and passed away from cardiac arrest. Although we do
also know that he suffered from COPD as well as liver disease, so we're pretty excited
to see those, if we can see much at all, once we begin the dissection process.
Jonathan: This individual is our oldest by age. She passed away in her early 90s,
mostly from natural causes but we did get some information that she had the early signs
of dementia. We were extremely excited to pick up this body because we had a pretty good idea
that she still had the uterus, the ovaries, the uterine tube so we could teach
female reproductive anatomy, and she's been featured in a lot of
our YouTube videos to help people be more educated about that particular anatomy.
Justin: This next individual passed away in his early 80s from a stroke.
Now, we haven't gotten to his brain yet but that's because we've been primarily focusing on doing
muscular dissections. And during that process of dissecting, we discovered that he suffered
during his lifetime an inguinal hernia. And in fact, we even did an entire video all about it.
Jonathan: Now, this next body might be a little misleading because it actually
kind of looks like two bodies but it is one body that we cut through the sagittal plane.
Now remember, I discussed the band saw and the dissection process
and we don't do this to be barbaric, this is to help students learn internal
anatomy and get different perspectives of how the human body is put together.
If you've ever seen CT scans or MRIs, they often will slice up the body through imaging so people
can look at different anatomical structures. So, extremely relevant to medicine. Now this
particular body died mid-80s again, from breast cancer. We also found some very interesting things
like a really large cystic ovary that we theorize possibly was due to PCOS.
Justin: This next individual in reality is our oldest cadaver and that's because we've
had him for approaching 10 years now and he was also passed down to us from another instructor
who taught using this fetus in the classroom for around 30 years. So bare minimum 40 years.
We actually did an entire video where Jonathan went into detail about possible gestational age
but he also discussed that we actually don't understand the circumstances surrounding the
death. But one thing we do know is that in the death of this young individual here,
he's been able to teach, at this point, now millions across the entire world.
Jonathan: And finally Geoffrey the skeleton. Geoffrey is the one we
know the least about but he was donated to us from another school
and based on the pelvic measurements that we did, we can assume male. Now,
some other questions we often get about Geoffrey the skeleton is why is he painted in red and blue
colors... And this is because these are signifying or representing muscle attachments where one
muscle attaches to one bone to the other so we can understand how muscles mobilize the joints.
Now Geoffrey's been in a lot of our YouTube videos as well as Instagram and TikTok
and he'll continue to make these cameos in all of our future videos.
Thanks for watching and going on this behind the scenes tour with us and again we want
to take a second to say thank you to all those who donate their bodies to science.
We could not do this without this amazing anatomical gift and now we're able to educate
millions of people across the country - frankly, across the world and so
thank you again to these amazing people who donate their bodies to science.
Justin: And it wouldn't be one of our videos if we weren't adding shameless plugs at the
end. But I do want to say that it's not entirely shameless and that's because
if you do Like, comment, subscribe those things actually help with engagement and
make the videos perform better so that they can or we can continue to educate
more and more people. And also you'll notice we have some anatomical artwork on the back
wall. If you want to find the link in the description, you can purchase some of that
and that too goes to supporting the channel so that would be much appreciated, but - Jonathan:
Thank you for listening to our shameless plug and we'll see you in the next video.
See you.