When you study medicine, practical skills are crucial to learn. You wouldn’t want a doctor practising on you! That means going into the ‘snijzaal’, which translates to the ‘cutting room’. Member of the medicine faculty council Aniek Spil offered some insight into the cutting room that normally stays closed!

‘These are people that donated their body to science’, Spil explains when we asked her about the room. ‘You are working with what you call ‘preparations.’ It is important that students don’t call them cadavers or corpses, Spil tells us, because ‘that is disrespectful’. Normally this is all explained in the introduction lecture medicine students go to before they enter the room, but this year the lecture was substituted by a short introduction in the cutting room itself.

‘You are really going to look at the heart from the inside. And your intestines. I remember that clearly, because the way you think your intestines look like, does not match reality at all.’ It has been three years since Spil first entered the cutting room, but there are certain things she remembers quite clearly: ‘I was very nervous, you don’t want to do something wrong. It is quite scary.’

Students are introduced to the cutting room immediately in their first year and in the first semester, they are already, what Spil calls, ‘preparing’ the body. This means cutting into the body. ‘You first remove the skin, then the fat (…) slowly, you go deeper into the body.’

While that might sound like a very intense experience, Spil explains that ‘you often see with students, that it isn’t so bad in the end.’ Afterwards, there isn’t any reflection or evaluation, but ‘there is attention for struggling students, and they make sure that if you feel uncomfortable you can say so.’

A lecture to introduce this overwhelming experience might seem crucial, so is it alarming that this year’s first years didn’t have one? Spil says that she hasn’t heard so from any students. ‘It might sound weird, but in the end, you are really just studying.’