Some sceptics think that the new trendy medical courses which do not have proper dissection on cadavers mean that you are not a proper medic. It is viewed as a rite of passage thing. Eight students standing around a corpse anticipating the green light to cause mass destruction was what defined us as medical students. We had this exclusive privilege that no other course could confer on its students.

However, the problem with dissection was its didactic nature; students crowding round a cadaver being told which nerve supplies which muscle with little, if any, participation. I was one of the last cohorts of our medical school who did dissection. Those who did help dissect seemed to spend the whole afternoon trying to find one obscure nerve while the rest of us (me included) went straight to the pro sections (only to forget what we learnt the following day). There were no links to clinical medicine to help us recall or make the anatomy more interesting. Furthermore, as the year progressed fewer and fewer people turned up; they preferred other efficient methods of self study.

According to a consultant surgeon, one of the main problems with traditional clinical medical students is that few of them could answer simple anatomical questions correctly. Surely, if the whole point of dissection was to imprint these fundamental anatomical concepts into our minds then it is not working. St Bartholomew's and the Royal London Medical School of Medicine realised this and decided to implement new teaching strategies for the 1999 intake.

The next problem was knowing how much anatomy students should be taught. A working party was set up at St Bartholomew's and the Royal London consisting of surgeons, anatomists, and dentists. Advice was also sought from other medical schools and the Royal College of Surgeons. The working party decided that dissection was not a cost effective method of teaching within the context of a systems based curriculum. It wanted to aim the level of anatomy required to the level of preregistration house officer. Some might argue that this is not enough and we should go back to the times when we studied anatomy in great detail. However, with the exponential increase in the medical knowledge that we are meant to absorb there seems little point learning things which we will not use in everyday practice. Only 5% of medical students become surgeons so a high level of anatomy at such an early stage is not necessary for most of us. In addition, the surgeons I have talked to say that cadavers feel nothing like living bodies. So, arguing for dissection on the premise that you need tactile stimulation to appreciate surgery is just as flawed.

So, an entirely new curriculum was set up at our medical school. Clinical scenarios form the backbone and any relevant anatomy is taught alongside to maintain our interest and facilitate understanding. Dissection on cadavers was replaced by plastic models, pro sections, computer programs, and diagnostic imaging techniques, all of which are used simultaneously to make anatomy more applicable. Students get a full picture of the medical condition and the associated anatomy plus the investigative procedures required. Other learning techniques are being proposed, such as having head sets which give a running commentary on specimens and video links to real time operations. This is all very exciting and I believe it is something more medical schools should adopt.

A study by Peter Dangerfield and colleagues at Liverpool University Medical School looked at gross anatomy teaching and student evaluation of the new course after they had abolished dissection.¹ Results show overwhelming support for the anatomical content of the course with a high proportion of students rating it as "good" and "very good."

With the way that the new curriculum is planned anatomy becomes stimulating and clinically relevant. There will be no point in spending a whole afternoon dissecting tissues when the chances of requiring them in everyday clinical practice are relatively small compared with everything else that we need to know about to become competent doctors. We need to change the mentality that dissection is the ideal and the right way of learning human anatomy. There are more stimulating aids available. In an age when technology is progressing all the time, we will miss out if we are left behind.