Tapu, whakanoa and a medical student’s first human dissection
In the old days of medical education, little thought was given to the emotional and spiritual weight of dissecting a human body. First-year medical student Ronan Payinda explains how that’s changed – and not just for those holding the scalpel.
Before I first cut into a dead body, it was as if there had been a curtain blocking me from a clear view of mortality. It was a veil that spared me from thinking about what the people I had known in life would look like in death.
For a couple of years before entering medical school, I volunteered as a caregiver at a hospice in Northland. Caring for the terminally ill always holds us in proximity to death. When you’re around people who know their life is coming to a close, death does not seem so distant and unimaginable as it does for most of us in our day-to-day lives.
Link to article: Lifting the veil: Tapu, whakanoa and a medical student’s first human dissection | The Spinoff
