“A lot of people aren’t thrilled with going to work,” he says. “I like going to work.” While some people might shiver at the idea of confronting one’s own mortality every day, for Anderson, it’s just a passing thought. He focuses instead on what can be learned. He teaches courses in microbiology, bioethics, human dissection, and human physiology, and each one broadens his perspective. “Most of what I see, what you see on the whiteboard,” he says, “is that there is a story. And the students want to see what the story is.” The walls of the lab are a testament to Anderson’s teaching. Framed letters and emails from former students titled “long lost student” and “thank you” decorate the lab. Some write from medical school, thanking Anderson for pushing them so hard as undergraduates. Others have become nurses, physical therapists, and teachers. All of the notes echo the same sentiment: “You have devoted your life and career to teaching and the world is better off for it.” Between 1,500–1,700 high school students visit the human anatomy lab each year and most are interested in pursuing careers in medicine. Anderson shepherds them into the cadaver lab with an earnest enthusiasm. He wants them to ask questions. To feel the organs displayed. To be inspired by what they see. So that they will go into the field and improve it. “Watching [students] get their first scalpel to open a body up … it’s quite illuminating to them,” he says. “And you can’t do that with plastic models, you can’t do it with electronic tablets. I am a very firm believer in using real cadavers.”
Advances in technology may one day make labs like these obsolete. These labs can be expensive to maintain. Some medical schools have begun using mannequins and computer dissection programs rather than cadavers. But for Anderson, using human bodies to teach anatomy is sacrosanct. So much so that he will take this belief to the grave. “I’ve been here 36 years, and I plan to be here another 20, and then come back here after I am dead,” Anderson says. “I figure I’ve been an educator in life, I will be an educator in death.”
K
athleen was 35, a physician in the Salt Lake City area, and dying of metastatic breast cancer. When she arrived at USU’s cadaver lab she had undergone a bilateral mastectomy and had additional tumors in her brain, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract. She chose to donate her remains to science because her body was yet another casualty of humankind’s war with cancer. We win only if the medical community learns something from those who lose their lives to the disease. Kathleen’s story is just one that Anderson tells students before they lift a scalpel.
FOR ANDERSON, USING HUMAN BODIES T O T E A C H A N AT O M Y I S S A C R O S A N C T. S O M U C H S O T H AT H E W I L L TA K E T H I S B E L I E F TO T H E G R AV E . 36 UTAHSTATE I SPRING 2020
For the aspiring medical professionals in Anderson’s courses, cadavers are often the first patients to show students the effects of age and illness on the the body—inside and out. The organs the dead leave behind often tell the story of disease so that other people may live longer and, hopefully, better. But for now, there will be many more Kathleens wheeled through this door. Every July, new cadavers arrive from the donation program at the University of Utah and are disassembled by USU students studying human anatomy and physiology. Heads come off, arms, legs, pelvises, and skin, too. Hearts, livers, and brains are removed. After one year, Anderson explains, the cadavers are sent to Redwood Road in Salt Lake City where they are reduced to piles of bone and ash and returned to family members in a box. “Like this one,” he says passing one off to the Highland High students. Then Anderson relays the rules of the lab. The first two are routine—no cell phones and limit chatter, but when listing the third rule, Anderson’s voice hardens: do not make fun of the cadavers. Respect these patients. “That is the way we repay our debt,” he says. As students tie on plastic aprons, one turns and worriedly whispers, “Will the cadavers bleed?” The class is divided into three groups led by Anderson and two USU student aides, including Jodie Coleman, a medical interpreter for deaf patients at Intermountain Health on a path to becoming a nurse practitioner. She sewed the phrase “Miss Hudson took my skull” to the back of her white lab coat, an homage to Sherlock Holmes. Coleman keeps a dollar coin in her pocket in case anyone can guess the reference. No one has, yet. She begins with a cadaver named John. He is having his central nervous system removed. It looks like a series of cords strung into the shape of a stick figure. Our brains are kind of the same consistency of Jello Jigglers, Coleman says. “It’s not very often you get to hold a human brain in your hands with the
