For the first time this year, Calvin has started its very own cadaver lab to give a better education to anatomy students.
The lab space itself resides on the basement level of Devries Hall, which used to be the West Michigan Regional Lab for over 20 years. According to Ryan Bebej, professor of biology at Calvin and one of the professors running the lab, the space was leased until the COVID-19 pandemic and used for research by people mostly outside Calvin. “Local researchers and physicians in the community actually had a space to do research down there including with small animals and things like that. They’d also do surgical demonstrations and things like that over the years,” Bebej said. The space included a “kind of mini surgical suit” and “several rooms that were connected where you could do little surgeries for educational purposes” as well as the equipment needed to properly house cadavers, according to Bebej.
When the lease ended, the department was left with a brand new space they didn’t know what to do with. “Initially I was thinking I would make use of what was there and figure out how to make it work, but then the donation for the School of Health came through and one of the visions for that was to renovate this space and to make it better than what it was,” Bebej said.
“We wanted our students to have state-of-the-art learning opportunities with both cadavers and virtual dissection tables so that anatomy students could work with cadavers,” provost Noah Toly told Chimes. Once the space was ready, Bebej and Dr. Kevin Kane, a reconstructive orthopedic surgeon and co-teacher in the lab, began doing their own dissections to test feasibility for the inaugural class, according to Bebej.
The class is currently made up of 12 students, each of which has taken a full year of anatomy courses at Calvin and has previous dissection experience. “The students have been great and they’ve been really adaptable.I think they’re having a great experience and I think they’re seeing the challenge,” Bebej said.
“One of the most beautiful things we’ve seen in the past couple weeks is the groups teaching one another and this innate sense of curiosity that comes out too,” Bebej told Chimes. “These students are dissecting a part of the body on an individual and you can’t see a particular muscle very well. So they’ll shift over to another group who has it really nicely and that group will show, ‘oh well here’s how we dissected it, here’s how we can see these muscles relating, but we can’t see this very well.’ And that group that came over for help on one thing says, ‘oh on our donor you can actually see that structure really well so why don’t you come on over.’”
According to Toly, anatomy was previously taught primarily with cats, which was “adequate, but it’s not the best.” Cats are still used in the 200 level class, but having the cadaver lab class allows students to better understand the variation in the human body as well as gain practical experience according to Bebej. “We’re probably not going quite as deep as they will in med school, but we’re definitely going deeper than we were in our 200 level class. So this is providing these students just like an extra layer of experience and knowledge that we think is gonna prepare them really well for whatever’s coming next for them,” Bebej told Chimes.
In the future, the lab will be offered every fall and spring semester and will be open to more than the current 12 students.
