Feelings of Gratitude in Dissection‐ and Prosection‐Based Cadaveric Anatomy Courses

Abstract

IntroductionParticipation in a cadaveric anatomy course often elicits strong emotions in students, which may have lasting impacts on students’ education and future careers. Gratitude is a prevailing cultural value in many cadaveric anatomy courses, as evidenced by referring to cadaveric specimens as “donors” and the gratitude ceremonies conducted at the end of many courses. Gratitude is also prevalent within medical school as a whole. For example, due to the difficulty of the application process, many students feel extremely grateful to be able to attend medical school at all. Prosection‐based curricula have been proposed as a time‐efficient alternative to traditional dissection‐based courses. However, little is known about the differences in emotional impact that may arise from this change in course design. We compared the emotional impacts of a dissection‐based course vs. a course in which cadavers were prosected (pre‐dissected). Our objective was to investigate potential differences between the emotions elicited, such as gratitude, based on pedagogical method.MethodsStudents who took a dissection‐based anatomy course in 2019 and those who took a prosection‐based course in 2020 due to the COVID‐19 pandemic were given a validated survey instrument to compare their emotional experiences. The survey included the free‐response question, “Please describe your feelings in regards to the time spent with the donor or donors using three adjectives, and explain your adjective choices.” The responses were analyzed using a grounded theory thematic analysis approach; readers were blind to which cohort wrote which data set. The researchers identified primary codes based on word frequency and pertinence to students’ emotional experiences, and then each instance of each code was examined within the context of the response to generate secondary codes until thematic saturation was reached.ResultsThe codes appreciate, grateful, and humbled appeared in both data sets. Appreciatehad the widest use case, as appreciatewas also used to acknowledge the complexity or beauty of human anatomy. Humbled had the narrowest use case: this code was primarily directed to the donors or their choice to donate, and also conveyed a greater emotional intensity than the other two codes. Grateful was used most commonly towards the donors and towards the learning experience. A majority of the students in the dissection‐based course who used grateful expressed gratitude toward the donor for improving their learning experience; this connection between the donors and enhanced learning was not observed as frequently in the prosection group. The prosection group was also grateful for a wider variety of things.DiscussionBoth groups in this study expressed gratitude as a major component of their emotional experience in the anatomy laboratory. The results suggest that, for the students in the dissection group, there was a stronger connection between the donors’ presence or choice to donate and their learning. The prosection group expressed gratitude to the donors and to the learning experience, but more often expressed these feelings as separate ideas. These findings elucidate the types of gratitude experienced by anatomy students in different anatomy laboratory experiences.