Anatomy as a Science Worth Seeing: Killing Many Birds of Our Academic Role with One Stone

Abstract

As anatomy academics, formal parts of our role are to engage the community, provide service to our university and to our discipline of anatomy. With increasing demands and workloads, it can be difficult to fulfill all of these different roles. However, it is possible to meet many of these different roles at the same time through anatomy outreach.To many, the general public and others in the scientific community, anatomy is often seen as a dead science (or simply a science of studying the dead). Our role, in providing service to the discipline of anatomy, is to dispel this misconception and demonstrate that anatomy is very much for the living. As anatomists, we're also lucky in that, compared with many of the other sciences, anatomy has the added bonus of being highly visual – something which is also highly coveted by people interested in marketing and the media. Now, while we cannot typically use cadaveric anatomy to engage the public, there are a number of other activities which we can use – anatomical body painting, for example.Anatomical body painting (ABP) was introduced to our level 1 introductory Human Biology unit as a means to increase student engagement with the musculoskeletal system. While ABP is not new to anatomy education, it was new to this specific context and to this institution. Through the engagement of the university's marketing team, local media were invited to film the practical and perform interviews. Soon after, cascading invitations to bring ABP to public engagements began to flow and the level of anatomy engagement with the community increased.ABP was used at the university's Open Days. With the help of a life‐model and a number of volunteer students, over the course of five hours, Anatomy‐Man was painted. Also introduced was the ABP of the hand skeleton on the general public, an anatomical‐themed variation of face‐painting often seen at fairs and birthday parties, which proved extremely popular with younger audiences.Anatomy was subsequently included in “Science Worth Seeing”, a public science engagement event supported by the Federal Government's Inspiring Australia grant. Anatomy was promoted through ABP, ABP of hand skeletons for children and the use of plastic anatomical models as jigsaws, all of which enabled multiple meaningful interactions and discussions about the human body with children and the general public. ABP also made an appearance at a pop‐up science bar during Australia's National Science Week, which featured on a national news bulletin.Embracing the power of the visual nature of anatomy through activities such as ABP, anatomists can provide service to the discipline, to their institutions and provide outreach to the community.Support or Funding InformationPartly funded through The University of Tasmania's School of Medicine Staff Research Conference Support.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.