No, seriously. We NEED them:
A shortage of donor bodies is putting medical teaching at risk, the Royal College of Surgeons has warned. About 1,000 bodies are needed every year to teach anatomy to medical students, it is estimated. But the college predicted a 30% national shortfall in the number of bodies needed by medics in the current academic year.
And our city is the worst with an expected 40% shortfall expected.
London, what on earth are you doing with all that rotting flesh? Burning it? Burying it? What a waste... If you let a maggot into your unfeeling, unseeing eyeball then its not learning anything that it didn't already know - ie. that dead eyeballs are yummy. Let a student have a go at your bits though and he or she can go on to save lives because of your help.
Seems like a simple choice to us.
By law, medical schools may only accept bodies from individuals who have made a specific request for their bodies to be bequeathed for medical study. And the Human Tissue Act now requires a witness be present. The college said that while many people carry donor consent cards, they may not be aware of - or are reluctant to undertake - the necessary procedures for donating their bodies to medical schools.
So just to put our corpse where our mouth is (ick), at least one Londonist is going to fill out the necessary forms.
Maybe sometime in the very distant future (fingers crossed) our surviving colleagues can live-blog the dissection.
