Camp Comes With Cadavers Hands-On Anatomy Class Part Of Gifted-Kids Program
Tricia Hoppe downed her ham sandwich and fries quickly, because she wanted to get her hands inside a dead body.
She’s 14 and wants to be a psychologist. On Friday, she played forensic pathologist. She cupped human hearts, touched human lungs, pulled at snapped tendons and lifted up layers of skin.
And then, she’d had too much.
“I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” Hoppe said to best friend Kimberly Fulton, leaning over one of six cadavers.
“This is amazing,” said Fulton, 14, who wants to be a doctor. “This is so cool. I want to rip open a lung. This made Satori for me.”
“Satori” is Japanese for “enlightenment” or “aha!” The 98 students at this year’s Satori Camp for gifted children at Eastern Washington University spent a week studying everything from law to eggs, from forest ecology to hypnosis.
The 19 kids in Dr. Sidney Kasuga’s human anatomy and physiology class ended camp Friday with a real-life lesson using bodies.
Kasuga, an EWU biology professor who’s taught at the camp for all of its 13 years, gave the students 1-1/2 hours to learn and explore the human body by looking at six cadavers.
“These are individuals who have donated themselves to further our education,” Kasuga told the students. “We should always remind ourselves that they deserve our respect.”
The students, from ages 12 to 18, greeted the bodies with a mixture of awe and nervous joking. They filed into a lab room and waited for three graduate students to unwrap the cadavers.
“You guys ready for this?” asked Ben Rowley, an EWU graduate student in microbiology, removing a plastic cover from a woman with an enlarged liver.
“Oh my,” said future pathologist Ana Cornea, one of two 12-year-olds in the class. “I think a live person looks much better.”
“Oh, this is not what I expected,” said Terry Igel, a 15-year-old with wide eyes.
The bodies weren’t new.
The newest had been used by medical students at the university for almost a year, the oldest for probably two years. Medical students had dissected the bodies, removing rib cages and skin, leaving tissue and organs. The cadavers are also used to explain anatomy to college classes throughout the school year.
The kids identified diaphragms, livers and intestines. Wearing latex gloves, the students looked inside skulls, poked eye sockets and peered into hearts.
The students compared body parts to everything. Skin felt like leather. A tongue felt hard as rock.
The room smelled like high school biology class and formaldehyde, except the smell was just garden-variety embalming fluid. It made some queasy. It made three girls leave the lab for the classroom, where they played marathon games of hangman.
Andrea Kidd, 15, wore a mask of nausea on her face. She stood back away from the cadavers, holding her arms in front of her.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Kidd said. “It’s not my thing, I don’t think. But it’s interesting.”
In between tugging on small intestines and lifting up kneecaps, the students flashed over the lives on the tables.
“It’s weird to think about it,” Hoppe said. “These people were once living and walking.”
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