Many physicians and social scientists have questioned the pedagogical value of cadaver dissection. After all, the cadaver is dead and artificially preserved; it is smelly, leathery, and utterly lacking in the “flux” that constitutes life. Some prestigious medical schools have abandoned it altogether, instead teaching anatomy on plastic “prosections” of body parts. But for the most part, American medical schools (though not Italian ones) still insist on cadaver dissection, going so far as to defend it as a “rite of passage,” in which even the trauma that some medical students experience can be
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