The Students’ Body : Dissection of Cadaver a Fascinating, Trying Experience at Oak Park High

Cynthia Fuhrmann has gone through the usual routine of high school biology classes. She has dissected a frog, a crayfish, a grasshopper and a fetal pig.

But those experiences didn’t come close to preparing her for Tuesday’s class at Oak Park High School.

As surgeon Steven Weinstein guided her gloved hand, Cynthia gripped a scalpel and carefully sliced open the chest of a human cadaver.

“I was expecting it to be a lot tougher, a lot harder than it was,” she said. “It was kind of like a hard, tough jelly.”

During the next two weeks, Cynthia and the 20 students in Winnie Litten’s advanced-placement biology class will examine other parts of the body, with the help of specialists from Kaiser Permanente medical center in Woodland Hills.

While some students shied away from the body and the overwhelming smell of embalming fluid, Cynthia--who has been honored as a National Science Scholar--said she wasn’t at all nervous. She plans to go into medical research, either as a doctor or a biologist.

“My grandfather died of cancer,” she said, “and I want to help find a cure for cancer.”

Joining Cynthia to make the initial cuts was senior Ben Furst. He and Cynthia are the top students at the high school and will be co-valedictorians of the graduating class.

“I’m a little nervous,” Ben said at first. “When I first saw the incision that Cynthia made, I thought: ‘This is a real person.’ ”

Ben had another reason for participating. He has already been guaranteed admission to the USC Medical School after he completes his undergraduate studies there.

“This is a good preview, to see if I could handle it,” Ben said.

The night before, Ben had gone on an urgent search for gloves. He appeared with a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves, the kind designed for dishwashing.

It was the right idea but the wrong tool. Dr. Weinstein handed Ben a pair of thinner, more flexible surgical gloves, which he said would be more comfortable.

Litten asked all of her students to wear gloves so they could participate.

“I want you to be able to hold something today, whether it’s a heart or a lung,” she announced.

That prospect did not excite every student.

Ben’s brother, Jonathan, a junior who is also in the class, found the exercise in gross anatomy to be, well, gross.

Maintaining a pained expression, Jonathan sat in the back of the class--far, far from the cadaver. He said he was not at all jealous that his brother had gotten to dissect the body first.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine with me,” Jonathan said.

Joanne Smets covered her ears and cringed at some of the sounds of the dissection.

“This class changed my mind about everything. I don’t want to do anything with biology anymore,” Joanne declared.

But Rose Gil, a senior, had no such qualms. She sat next to the cadaver and curiously touched the organs and the skin with her gloved hands.

“It’s pretty interesting to find out what’s inside your own body,” said Gil, who wants to be a scientist.

She found lung tissue especially interesting.

“You know the poppers, like when you pack a picture?” she said, referring to the air-filled bubbles used as packing material. “It feels like poppers, soft and smooth.”

Litten got the idea for the cadaver class from Westlake High School, where teacher Nancy Bowman runs an acclaimed class in which a select group of students spends the entire year dissecting cadavers.

Because Oak Park High is a much smaller school and does not offer a separate anatomy class, Litten said it could not support a similar program.

This project, she said, is the best alternative. Her students already have completed their regular course work, which ended with their taking the advanced-placement biology test for college. From now until the end of school June 23, they will work on different parts of the body.

Litten said the body is that of a 70-year-old man who died of a heart attack and donated his body for research. The face and the lower part of the body were covered with towels, and students were not told of the man’s background.

“I told them to refer to him as ‘the case’ or ‘the cadaver’ because I try not to personalize it,” Litten said.

Last fall, Litten and her husband picked up the body from a medical school in San Diego and carried it back in a school truck.

Litten lined up corporate donors to help finance the class.

Dr. Howard Levy, a Kaiser ophthalmologist who is active in the Oak Park school district, organized several of his colleagues to donate their time to the project.

Westlake Medical Center in Westlake Village donated money to buy the cadaver and its auxiliary provided the dissection equipment. Los Robles Regional Medical Center provided a gurney, and Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks mortuary will cremate the cadaver and spread the ashes at sea.

Weinstein, who came to class after performing a routine hernia operation earlier that morning, said watching the students was invigorating.

“When you operate on people every day, some of the wonder of it all goes away. And you can see some of the wonder here,” Weinstein said.

“I see the human body every day. The students in this class have never seen it, ever,” he said. “It makes me appreciate how amazing it all is, that it actually all fits together the way it does.”

After class was finished, Cynthia Fuhrmann peeled off her surgical gloves and stepped out of her operating gown.

Then the future scientist, who had calmly opened a cadaver’s chest, removed a lung and probed its heart, headed off to eat lunch.