There is a Latin sentence that hangs, in one form or another, on the walls of many dissecting rooms and mortuaries: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. This is the place where death delights to help life. Its origin is uncertain, and it has been painted, carved and printed so often that it has the anonymity of a proverb. It is a fine sentence. It is also, if one reads it slowly, a presumptuous one, because it speaks for the dead. It attributes to them a delight that no one has asked them about, and it describes their bodies’ use as their own act of help. Whether that description is true depends on facts the sentence does not mention: who these people were, how their bodies came to be in this room, and what, if anything, they agreed to.
A first cadaver is a category before it is a memory. Every medical student who studies anatomy by dissection meets, at some point early in training, the body of a person who has died and whose remains have been given, or taken, for teaching. This essay does not describe a particular body, a particular hall or a particular first session, and it does not supply the dead person with a life. That refusal is part of its argument. The student at the table does not know who the person was, and in most traditions of anatomical teaching is not meant to know. The question is what such a student owes to someone whose story is withheld, and whether the customary language of gratitude, the language of that sentence on the wall, is a sufficient answer.
Recognition #
Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Body-Snatcher,” published in 1884, is set in the Edinburgh of the late 1820s, among the students of an extramural teacher of anatomy whom Stevenson calls only “Mr. K—.” Readers of the time knew who was meant. Robert Knox’s dissecting rooms had been supplied by William Burke and William Hare, who in 1828 murdered a series of people in order to sell their bodies, and Stevenson’s narrator reminds us that the mob that cheered Burke’s execution called for the blood of his employer too. The story’s young assistant, Fettes, has the duty of receiving the bodies that arrive before dawn, paying for them and dividing them among the students. His master’s policy is to ask no questions. “They bring the body, and we pay the price,” K— likes to say; and, “somewhat profanely,” he tells his assistants to ask no questions “for conscience’ sake.” Fettes, Stevenson writes, understood his duty to have three branches: “to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.”
Then, one November morning, the sack is opened and Fettes looks at the face. “God Almighty!” he cries. “That is Jane Galbraith!” He had joked with her the day before. The men who brought her shuffle toward the door. Fettes consults his superior, the brilliant and unscrupulous Macfarlane, who examines the marks of violence on the body and gives the advice on which the rest of the story turns. Least said, soonest mended. “The next best thing for me is not to recognise it,” Macfarlane says, “and,” he adds coolly, “I don’t.” The girl is dissected, and no one remarks on her.
The horror of the story is recognition, and its moral is about the uses of not recognising. The bodies in Knox’s rooms were anonymous, and the anonymity was convenient: it protected the buyers from knowledge they did not want. Jane Galbraith breaks it by being someone the assistant knew, and the institution’s response is to restore the anonymity by an act of will. Not knowing, in this story, is not respect. It is a technique for avoiding responsibility.
Modern anatomical teaching keeps the dead anonymous for reasons that have nothing to do with Knox. Anonymity protects the dignity of the deceased and the privacy of families; it spares students the burden of learning on someone they might know; it allows the work of learning to proceed without the paralysis that recognition would cause. Those are good reasons. But Stevenson’s story is a permanent warning that anonymity has two possible beneficiaries. It can protect the dead, or it can protect the living from asking how the dead arrived. A student at a dissecting table cannot know which kind of anonymity he is standing inside unless someone tells him, and the institution that keeps the dead unnamed has a particular duty to be able to say, if asked, where they came from.
A Person Whose Story Is Withheld #
What is a student to do with a body whose life is unknown? The temptation, for a thoughtful student, is to supply one. The body carries marks: a healed fracture, a surgical scar, the wear of a particular kind of work in the joints of the hands, the evidence of an illness. Each mark is a sentence from a biography, and the mind, which cannot leave a sentence unfinished, begins to write the rest. Who was this? What did he do with these hands? Was the scar the end of a long illness or the beginning of a short one? Who missed him?
I think the right discipline is to recognise personhood without inventing a person. The body was someone; that is not in doubt, and every act at the table should proceed from it. But the someone is not available, and an imagined life, however sympathetic, is a fiction placed over a real person who cannot correct it. The imagined life also tends to become the student’s own, a story about the student’s sensitivity rather than about the dead. The honest posture holds two facts at once: this was a person, and I do not know who. The absence of a biography is not the absence of significance. It is a boundary drawn around a life the student was never given.
Not every tradition draws that boundary in the same place, and the difference is instructive. At the medical school of Tzu Chi University in Taiwan, as three authors described in the BMJ in 2009, donors are honoured as “silent virtuous teachers,” and the dissection course has itself encouraged people to donate their bodies in a culture where donation was widely avoided. A 2018 survey of the sources of cadavers worldwide describes the Taiwanese approach as one that brings potential donors and students together in a culturally meaningful practice embedded in Buddhist tradition, which overcame a long-standing belief that the dead should not be disturbed. In such a programme students may learn something of the donor’s life, from the donor’s wishes and with the family’s consent, and the course is framed by ceremony.
The two practices, anonymity and consented acquaintance, look opposed, but they rest on the same principle: that whatever is known of the dead person should be known with permission, and whatever is not given should not be taken. The wrong lies on a third path, in invented biography, or in knowledge acquired without consent, or in the casual reading of a body’s marks as material for stories outside the room. The student who leaves the donor’s life unwritten and the student who receives it from a family’s hands are both respecting the same boundary. The one who fills the gap with his own fiction is not.
Beginning With the Dead #
It is a strange way to begin. A profession whose whole purpose is the care of the living starts its training, in most of the world, with the dead. The Indian regulations of 1997 placed anatomy at the centre of the first two semesters, and dissection was, for generations of students, among the very first things that medical school asked them to do with their hands. The order is so familiar that its strangeness has worn off, and it is worth restoring.
The usual explanation is that structure must be learned before function and the normal before the abnormal, and that is true. But there is a deeper reason, which has to do with how modern medicine came to know anything at all. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the French anatomist Xavier Bichat, in his Anatomie générale of 1801, told physicians, roughly in my rendering, to open a few corpses, and they would soon see the obscurity vanish that observation alone had never been able to dispel. The medicine that followed was built on that advice: on the patient correlation of what was seen and heard at the bedside in life with what was found in the body after death. The corpse was not merely the first object of a student’s training. It was the place where the modern clinic learned to see. A student who begins at the dissecting table is, without knowing it, repeating the history of his discipline.
The dead body has one property that no living body will ever have again in the student’s career: it permits complete looking. Every layer can be opened, every structure followed to its end, nothing withheld, no permission renewed. That is what makes it such a powerful teacher, and it is also what makes it a dangerous model. The living will never allow that kind of looking, and should not be asked to. Part of what a clinical education must later do is unteach the total gaze the dissecting room makes possible, and replace it with a looking that is partial, asked for and limited by consent.
Then there is mortality itself, which the dissecting room presents to the young more directly than anything else in their education, and which they are, in a sense, least prepared to receive. The structures a student traces in the dead are the structures he can feel in his own wrist and neck; the regulations ask him to mark on the living what he has dissected on the dead, and the symmetry is the closest most curricula come to teaching that the body on the table and the body at the table are the same kind of thing. Whether that lesson is learned in the first year, or only much later at the bedsides of the dying, varies from person to person.
Sir Thomas Browne, a physician of Norwich, wrote the finest meditation in English on the anonymous dead. Hydriotaphia, Urn-Buriall, published in 1658, was occasioned by a find of ancient burial urns in a Norfolk field, the ashes of people whose names no one would ever know. “But who knows the fate of his bones,” Browne asks, “or how often he is to be buried?” The question has an exact application to a body given for anatomy, which will be laid out, studied for months, and only then committed to its rites. In the book’s last chapter Browne turns to the namelessness of nearly all the dead, and his sentences are the best corrective I know to the temptation to regard an unnamed body as a lesser one. “Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?” Most of the dead, he says, “must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man.” And, of those who did good without leaving a name: “To be nameless in worthy deeds, exceeds an infamous history.”
Anonymity, in Browne’s account, is not a diminished condition. It is the common condition of the dead, and it says nothing about their worth. The person on the dissecting table belongs to that great majority. That he cannot be named is the ordinary fate of human beings, and not a reason to treat him as anyone less than the best of those who are remembered.
How the Bodies Came #
The sentence on the wall says that death delights to help life. History says that, for most of the modern era, the dead who helped medical students were not asked.
In Britain, the Murder Act of 1752 made dissection a further punishment for murder: the bodies of executed murderers could be handed to the surgeons, so that in law dissection became something added to death, a penalty beyond the gallows. Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson of 1632, with which the previous essay on this site opens, shows the body of a thief hanged that winter in Amsterdam. Executions did not supply enough bodies for the growing schools, and the shortfall was met by grave-robbing, and in Edinburgh, at least once, by murder. Parliament’s answer was the Anatomy Act of 1832, which gave licensed anatomists legal access to bodies that went unclaimed after death in workhouses and hospitals, and also provided for bodies to be given by bequest. The historian Ruth Richardson, in Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), argued that the Act in effect transferred the punishment of dissection from the murderer to the pauper. The people who died poor and alone became the people whose bodies taught medicine.
India’s own statutes followed a similar pattern a century later. According to a 2019 review of the country’s anatomy acts by V. Bharambe and colleagues, the first was the Bombay Anatomy Act of 1949, and most states then enacted their own acts on its model, so that almost every state now has one. The Maharashtra act provides for two sources of bodies, the unclaimed and the donated; most of the other state acts, the review found, rely on unclaimed bodies. The details are revealing in their bureaucratic precision. An unclaimed body is one not claimed by a near relative within a fixed time; rules in some states specify forty-eight hours. The Maharashtra act defines a near relative by degrees of kinship, lineal and collateral; the Uttar Pradesh act of 1956, the review notes, includes among those who may claim a body a person related to the deceased “as preceptor or disciple.” Under the Maharashtra act, the institution that receives a body must later provide for it to be decently cremated or buried according to the religion of the deceased. The Delhi rules, for bodies not needed for teaching, direct that they be handed to a social organisation for cremation or burial according to the person’s religious sensitivities, adding the parenthesis “(if known).”
Those two words contain the whole problem. The law of the unclaimed body is written for people about whom almost nothing may be known, sometimes not even their faith. In Punjabi such a body is ਲਾਵਾਰਸ (lāvāras), heirless. The category is a statement about absence: no relative arrived within the time allowed, and so the body passed into the custody of the state and, under these statutes, perhaps to a medical college.
The international profession has moved against this practice. In 2012 the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists recommended that only bodies donated by the deceased be used for anatomical teaching and research. A survey published in 2018 by three German authors, among them Andreas Winkelmann, then chair of the federation’s committee on ethics and medical humanities, covering sixty-eight countries that use cadavers, found that in only about a third were donated bodies the exclusive source, and that unclaimed bodies were procured in two-thirds. The use of unclaimed bodies, they note, has been criticised for proceeding without the consent of the deceased and for falling disproportionately on the poor and the mentally ill. Some countries import cadavers, they add, and the imported bodies come mostly from the United States, usually donated, and from India, usually unclaimed. In 2023 two Indian authors, writing in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, observed that unclaimed bodies are easily available in India and that clear ethical guidelines for their transport and exchange are lacking. A qualitative study from Bangalore in 2020 described a shift in India from unclaimed bodies toward voluntary donation, and recommended that donation be understood and honoured as daana, a gift given without expectation of return.
The general picture is clear enough, and it should complicate any easy use of the sentence on the wall. For much of the history of anatomy, in Britain and in India, the dead who taught were mostly those whom no one came to claim.
Custom and the Daintier Sense #
The first session at a dissecting table is famous for its strangeness, and the strangeness does not last. Within weeks the room becomes a place of work. The smell of preservative stops being noticed; the hands learn to hold instruments steadily; conversation returns. This is necessary. A student who remained as appalled on the fortieth day as on the first could not learn, and much of what the dissecting room teaches, beyond anatomy, is the capacity to stay present and useful in the presence of the dead and, later, of the dying.
Shakespeare caught the double edge of that capacity in the graveyard scene of Hamlet. The gravedigger is singing as he digs, and turning up skulls as he sings. Hamlet is shocked: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?” Horatio’s answer is the shortest account of professional habituation in English: “Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.” And Hamlet’s reply contains its cost: “’Tis e’en so; the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” The man who handles the dead every day has lost the delicacy of the man who rarely does. He can work; that is what custom has given him. He can also sing over a grave, and pitch a skull out of the earth without wondering whose it was, until Hamlet, later in the scene, takes one up and is told that it belonged to Yorick, the king’s jester. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.” The skull that was an object becomes a person the moment someone knew him. Shakespeare, like Stevenson, makes recognition the hinge.
Easiness shows itself first in language. The words used around the table, the body, the cadaver, the specimen, the donor, are not neutral. Each places the dead person at a different distance. Specimen makes him a thing; donor makes him a giver, which may or may not be true; body is plain and perhaps the most honest. Humour is the other register. Stevenson gives Fettes a joke, told in a tavern to a man who has just insulted Macfarlane: “We medicals have a better way than that. When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.” Macfarlane looks up sharply, as though the jest were scarcely to his mind, and the reader, who knows what Macfarlane knows, shivers. The sociologist Frederic Hafferty, in a 1988 paper titled “Cadaver stories and the emotional socialization of medical students,” examined the stories that circulate among entering students about pranks played with cadavers, and read them as part of how students learn what they are expected to feel and not to feel. Such stories, by most accounts, are told far more often than the pranks are performed. They teach composure by describing its failure.
I do not think the right response to gallows humour is to forbid it. People who work near death have always joked, and the joke is often a way of carrying what cannot be carried in silence. The useful distinction is between humour that releases tension among the living and humour at the expense of the dead person in the room: between laughing at the situation and laughing at him. The first may help the work. The second is a small version of what Macfarlane did with Jane Galbraith, a decision not to recognise. Silence, too, has a place, and the moment of silence that some anatomy departments now hold before the first dissection is not a sentimental extra. It is a deliberate act of recognition, placed at the moment when custom has not yet made the room easy.
What the Table Teaches #
Why dissect at all? The claim of anatomical tradition is that there is no substitute for the real body, with its three dimensions, its textures, its variations and its resistance to the knife. The claim has been tested less often and less well than its confidence suggests. In 2007 Andreas Winkelmann reviewed the published evidence on dissection as a teaching method and found fourteen relevant studies, all comparing groups of students taught by different approaches: active dissection, study of prosected specimens prepared by others, or combinations with computer aids. The designs varied, the groups were not always comparable, and the assessments were not standardised. With those cautions, and allowing for the bias of teachers evaluating their own new courses, the review found a slight advantage for traditional dissection over prosection in anatomical knowledge, and called for better research. The evidence, in short, is thinner than the arguments on either side.
Larger claims are made for dissection’s effect on character, and these deserve still more caution. It is often said that the dissecting room teaches respect, humility and the confrontation with mortality that a physician needs, and for some students it surely does. But exposure does not automatically produce empathy. Habituation, as Horatio says, produces easiness, and easiness can become indifference as readily as composure. What the table teaches depends on how the room is run: on what is said, what is permitted, what is noticed and what is allowed to pass.
One phrase in common use deserves particular scrutiny. The cadaver is often called the student’s “first patient.” The phrase is meant kindly, as a way of conferring dignity, and in some respects it is apt: the student examines the body systematically, learns from it, owes it care. In one crucial respect it is wrong, and the error is dangerous. A patient can refuse. A patient can ask what is being done and why, can say that something hurts, can withdraw permission halfway through. The dead can do none of this. A student who learns to think of a body that cannot object as his first patient may carry into the wards the idea that a patient is a body to which things are done. The cadaver is better described as the student’s first teacher who cannot speak, and the living patient, who can, is the subject of another essay on this site.
Gratitude and Consent #
Against all this it can fairly be said that the argument is ungenerous. Anatomy departments around the world hold services of thanksgiving for the people whose bodies they have studied; students write letters to the families of donors; the language of gratitude, the “silent teachers,” the sentence on the wall, is how institutions and students sustain respect for the dead through months of difficult work. To insist on the question of consent, the objection runs, is to replace a living practice of reverence with an audit. And for donated bodies, the language of teaching is not a fiction at all. The donors in the Bangalore study of 2020 described their decision as an act of service and altruism, made in the hope that students would become good and empathetic doctors. Many were willing to forgo the death rites their families expected. That sacrifice is easy to underestimate. A body given for anatomy is kept for many months, sometimes years, before its final disposal, and for a family that expects cremation or burial within days of a death, the gift defers the whole ordinary sequence of mourning. The donors were giving not only their bodies but the timing of their own funerals. They did intend to teach. The title the researchers chose for their paper was “the dead shall teach the living.”
I accept the force of this, and I think it sharpens the point rather than dissolving it. Where there was a bequest, the language of gratitude is earned, and the duty of the student is to deserve it. The Punjabi term for body donation, ਦੇਹਦਾਨ (dehdān), puts the body in the grammar of ਦਾਨ, the gift, and a gift implies a giver who chose to give. But the same grammar cannot honestly be applied to a body that was not given. An unclaimed body is not a gift; it is a body that passed into an institution’s custody because no one came for it within the time the law allowed. Thanking such a person for his generosity is a kindness addressed to someone who was never asked, and it can quietly erase the fact that he was never asked. Gratitude in that case should be accompanied by something harder: honesty about provenance, and a heightened standard of care precisely because consent is absent.
Consent also has more than one party. The same Bangalore study found that the donors’ next of kin were often uncomfortable with the decision, and recommended that the donor’s wishes be discussed with the family at the time of the bequest if they are to be respected. A body is not only a person’s; it is also, in a sense that many families understand without being told, a family’s, the object of rites and duties that fall on the living. A donation programme that honours the donor and ignores the family has respected half of what the death set in motion.
The law has begun, slowly, to say that the dead have standing of their own. A 2024 review of the legal framework in India notes that the Supreme Court has extended the constitutional right to dignity to deceased persons, and in a case decided in January 2002, Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan v. Union of India, held that homeless people who die should receive a dignified cremation according to their religious customs, with a corresponding duty on the state. The case concerned the homeless dead, not anatomy. But it states the principle from which any honest anatomy must begin: a person who dies with no one to claim him has not thereby ceased to be someone to whom things are owed.
The Body’s Particulars #
The previous essay on this site describes how the body departs from the diagram: muscles absent that the atlas draws, vessels that branch in unexpected places, the general lesson that the book is a reference and not a promise. The cadaver is where most students first learn this, and learning it has an ethical dimension that the books do not mention. The departures from the book are not errors. They are the individuality of a particular person, written into the structure of his body.
Some of that individuality is anatomical variation, present from birth. Some of it is history: the marks a life leaves. A joint worn by decades of a particular work, a bone that healed crookedly, the scar of an operation, the changes of an illness that may have been the cause of death. These are, as I said earlier, sentences from a biography, and they present the student with a practical as well as a moral question. They must be studied, because they are part of what the body can teach about disease and repair. They must not be displayed, photographed or described outside the room in ways that could identify the person or turn him into a curiosity. The 2024 review of Indian law recommends, among other things, that a donor’s consent explicitly address whether photographs of the dissected body may be used for teaching. That such a recommendation needs to be made at all says something about the temptation.
There is an old Punjabi way of speaking about the dead that bears on this. In everyday speech the body of a person who has died is often called ਮਿੱਟੀ (miṭṭī), earth, the word for soil, as though the body had already begun its return. Baba Farid’s shaloks in the Guru Granth Sahib return again and again to that destination: the body that was cherished and adorned going down into the ground, and the grave as the last and humblest home. The same word gives the language one of its harshest phrases. To ruin someone’s ਮਿੱਟੀ, ਮਿੱਟੀ ਖ਼ਰਾਬ ਕਰਨੀ, is to bring someone to ruin and disgrace, and to defile it, ਮਿੱਟੀ ਪਲੀਤ ਕਰਨੀ, is to dishonour him utterly. From the standpoint of that vocabulary, dissection stands very close to dishonour. It does to a body what the language treats as the worst thing that can be done to a person’s remains. What separates the two is not the act of cutting, which is the same, but the conduct around it: the purpose, the care, the silence, the refusal to make the dead a spectacle, the eventual return of what remains to the rites of his faith, if known. The anatomy room exists on the narrow ground between those two phrases, and only behaviour keeps it on the right side.
Afterwards #
What, then, does a student owe the first person whose body he learned from?
First, the learning itself. A body used for teaching and then not learned from has been used for nothing. The most basic gratitude a student can show is diligence: to look carefully, to identify what is there and not merely what the book predicts, to come prepared, to waste nothing. Second, confidentiality. What is seen in the dissecting room belongs there, and stories about the dead, especially stories that might let anyone guess who they were, are a breach of the same trust that will later protect living patients. Third, conduct: the language, the humour, the attention, the moments of silence, all the small behaviours that decide whether the room is a place of learning or of easiness in Horatio’s sense.
Some obligations are not the student’s to discharge. They belong to institutions. An anatomy department owes the dead a reliable record of where each body came from and on what legal basis; it owes them disposal according to their faith, as the statutes themselves require; it owes the families of donors an account of what was done, and the public a donation programme honest enough to be trusted.
The ending matters as much as the use. The 2019 review of Indian anatomy acts notes that because bodies take several months to years to be completely used, they are finally incinerated, and its authors suggest that the acts be amended so that the disposal of remains follows the rules for biomedical waste. The suggestion is practical, and it describes a real difficulty. But it marks the distance between the statute’s promise of a funeral according to the dead person’s faith and the incinerator at the end of a long academic year. A person who taught a class of students for a year should not finish as waste in anyone’s records, and the rites, where the faith is known, are part of what the institution owes. A medical college that uses unclaimed bodies owes something more: a willingness to be asked about them, and a commitment, in line with the profession’s own recommendation of 2012, to move toward a practice in which the dead who teach have chosen to.
The sentence on the wall says that death delights to help life. Death delights in nothing. It is the living who decide whether that sentence is true, by how they treat the people who can no longer object. Hamlet held Yorick’s skull and said that he knew him. The student at the table holds something harder, a person he did not know and is not permitted to know, and the right response to that ignorance is not invention and not indifference, but a care exact enough to be owed to anyone at all.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography relied on: MBBS at Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, 1997–2002; upbringing in Amritsar. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Body-Snatcher” (1884), quoted from Tales and Fantasies, Project Gutenberg eBook 426: Mr. K—, the mob at Burke’s execution, “They bring the body, and we pay the price,” “Ask no questions … for conscience’ sake,” Fettes’s three branches of duty, Jane Galbraith, “Least said soonest mended,” Macfarlane’s “not to recognise it,” and the tavern joke. Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i: Project Gutenberg eBook 1524. Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Buriall (1658), Epistle Dedicatory and chapter V: Project Gutenberg eBook 586. Medical Council of India, Regulations on Graduate Medical Education, 1997 (anatomy in Phase I; living anatomy): National Medical Commission PDF. The Murder Act of 1752, the Anatomy Act of 1832, the Bombay Anatomy Act of 1949 and later state acts modelled on it, the reliance of most state acts on unclaimed bodies, forty-eight-hour periods in some state rules, the definition of near relatives, the Uttar Pradesh act’s inclusion of “preceptor or disciple,” the duty to provide cremation or burial according to religion, the Delhi rules’ “(if known)”, and the final incineration of remains after months or years of use with the authors’ suggestion that disposal follow biomedical waste rules: V. Bharambe et al., “Anatomy acts in India: a review,” European Journal of Anatomy 2019;23:469–477 (PDF). IFAA’s 2012 recommendation; sources of cadavers in sixty-eight countries; criticisms of the use of unclaimed bodies; import of bodies from the United States and India; and the Taiwanese approach: J. L. Habicht, C. Kiessling and A. Winkelmann, Academic Medicine 2018;93:1293–1300 (full text, PMC). “Silent virtuous teachers” at Tzu Chi: S. C. Lin, J. Hsu and V. Y. Fan, BMJ 2009;339:b5001 (abstract). Unclaimed bodies in India and the lack of guidelines: S. Sreenivasan and V. Sreenivasan, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2023;8:128–133 (abstract). Donors, next of kin and religious scholars in Bangalore, daana, and the study’s title: A. Sasi et al., Asian Bioethics Review 2020;12:149–172 (abstract). Article 21 and the dead, Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan v. Union of India (9 January 2002), and the recommendation on consent to photography: S. Charmode et al., Cureus 2024;16:e58473 (full text, PMC), a secondary summary of the case. A. Winkelmann, Medical Education 2007;41:15–22 (abstract). F. W. Hafferty, Journal of Health and Social Behavior 1988;29:344–356: title and publication details from PubMed; the summary of its argument is standard reference knowledge. The Latin inscription and its uncertain origin; Xavier Bichat’s Anatomie générale (1801) and its advice to open corpses, given in the author’s rendering; the clinico-pathological method; Burke and Hare and Robert Knox; Rembrandt’s subject as a hanged thief; Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), paraphrased; the details of the Tzu Chi programme beyond the cited abstracts; the Punjabi senses of ਲਾਵਾਰਸ, ਦੇਹਦਾਨ, ਦਾਨ, ਮਿੱਟੀ, ਮਿੱਟੀ ਖ਼ਰਾਬ ਕਰਨੀ and ਮਿੱਟੀ ਪਲੀਤ ਕਰਨੀ; and the themes of Baba Farid’s shaloks, described and not quoted: standard reference knowledge. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. No dissection hall, first session, body, teacher, classmate, remark or feeling from the author’s training is described, and no donor’s identity, life or wishes is supplied. The essay makes no claim about the sources of bodies at any particular Indian college in any year. Baba Farid’s shaloks are referred to as they appear in the Guru Granth Sahib, without quotation. No hypothetical scene is used.
Analysis and forecast. The reading of Stevenson and Hamlet as stories of recognition, the distinction between anonymity that protects the dead and anonymity that protects the living, the argument against inventing donors’ biographies, the critique of the phrase “first patient,” the distinction between gratitude owed to donors and honesty owed to the unclaimed, the argument that the dissecting room’s complete looking must later be unlearned, the reading of Browne on anonymity, the reading of the Punjabi vocabulary of ਮਿੱਟੀ, and the account of student and institutional obligations are the author’s interpretation and ethical preference as of November 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.