Outrage over Cadaver Selfie "Craze"

On the first day he entered the dissection room and smelled formaldehyde, he felt so dizzy that he fainted. But after a few sessions, he got used it. Ali, now in his third year of medical school, pulls aside the white plastic cover, displaying a chest cavity, the heart, and arteries to his onlooking friends. Dissection exercises are now routine for him. But he remembers that, not so long ago, he brought a camera with him to his anatomy class.

Recently, Ali’s photos of his dissection class have caused a storm across Iran, after they were posted online, along with other similar photographs. “Medical Students’ Selfies with Cadavers,” read the accompanying headline. As a result, Iran’s medical students have faced criticism, accused of being insensitive, immoral and of disrespecting the bodies of the dead.

It turns out that most of the photos were not actually taken by medical students. For example, one of them is a selfie of a veterinary student holding a cow’s eye. But that has not stopped the tide of criticism.

Even Iran’s Health Ministry has been involved. Bagher Larijani, Deputy Health Minister for Education, sent a missive to all medical schools in Iran, demanding that the students treat dead bodies with due respect. Ahmad Shojaei, head of Iran’s Legal [Forensic] Medicine Organization said he was prepared to take action against members of the organzation who had allowed such photography to take place in dissection rooms they supervised. Only forensic medicine residents and their teachers are allowed in these rooms, and they are not permitted to disclose any information or release photographs taken during the exercises.

But Ali is surprised by the controversy. “I cannot figure out what is it that they find objectionable,” he tells IranWire. “Don’t we have photographs of engineers at their drawing desks? Well, we have pictures in the dissection room. I don’t think this is something new,” he said, though he admitted that the fact that the photographs had been shared on social networks was relatively new.

Sadegh is a sixth-year medical student who saw the pictures shared online. “Anatomy is difficult for students to learn,” he says. “I used to take a camera and record it. Before the exam, the film was passed around among students and that’s how we recalled the details. During the exam, for example, the professor would suddenly show us something that looked like a thin string and would ask us to name it. The body had been preserved in formaldehyde and the colors had gone completely dark. Nothing would indicate whether it was a nerve or a vein but you had to know. So we watched the film over and over again. And the day before the exam, we went to the dissection room to perform another exercise.”

“There is no problem if the photos and videos are for educational purposes and the face of the cadaver is not clear,” Halimeh Ali, an MP for Zabol and a member of parliament’s Health and Treatment Committee, told IranWire. “But posing next to the cadaver in the dissection room is highly immoral and the students who have committed this infraction must be warned.” When asked whether these warnings could lead to any more serious punishment, she refused to comment.

Not-so-Humble Bragging

According to Sadegh, many students in their early years of medical school take photographs in the dissection room. “We were of course very young when we started medical school and our dream of becoming doctors had just been realized,” he says. “I remember my first days, when medical students carried Guyton’s Textbook of Medical Physiology under their arms in a way so that the title would be clearly displayed.”

Remembering this now, he laughs. “Well, we were young and we wanted to boast that we had succeeded,” he says. “Many white-haired and well-known doctors also have pictures of themselves next to cadavers in the dissection room — but in the old days, social media was not as pervasive as it is now.”

But although Sadegh smiles when he speaks, Ali reacts with anger. “Believe me, many of the photos on Facebook and Instagram are not actually photographs taken by medical students,” he says. “One of the pictures is by some high school students from Gilan who were visiting the medical school. Some of the organs in the pictures do not belong to humans, because we do not dissect ears and eyes. We learn that anatomy by using models. But in some of these pictures, we can see a pair of human eyes resting on a human palm. Or we have a picture of someone posing with a heart. All organs of cadavers are dark-colored because of formaldehyde, but the heart in this picture is quite red. I think many of these photographs that have been associated with medical students were actually taken by high school kids in biology classes.”

Dr. Hamid-Reza Chegini holds a Ph.D. in anatomy and is a member of the scientific board of the medical school. He has been teaching anatomy to medical and paramedical students for years. IranWire asked him whether the publication of these photographs is immoral. “You cannot really make too much of it,” he says. “The kid is just 18-years-old and has just entered university. For students, boasting is important. They like to say that they are going to be doctors.”

“Like Every Other Job”

Chegini also believes that the practice of taking photographs next to cadavers is, and has been, commonplace among medical students. “Even paramedical students who do not spend that much time working on cadavers are excited and repeatedly come to the dissection room to take pictures,” he says. “We see a lot of this; sometimes they do cause trouble. For example, they pull aside the cover over the cadaver, which might lead it to dry up. So we tell the attendant to prevent them from doing so.”

Among the criticism of medical students have been protests against the way these bodies —  donated to the medical school for educational purposes — have now been used in lighthearted, comical, or sensationalist ways.

Chegini says these bodies cannot be identified.  “Before Imam Khomeini’s fatwa ruled that the bodies of Muslims can be used [for medical educational purposes], cadavers were bought from countries such as India. Since the fatwa, we import practically no cadavers from abroad. The bodies belong to individuals whose identities cannot be established by the forensics teams.”

Chegini says many students are afraid of these cadavers the first time they encounter them in the dissection room, just as Ali’s account of his early days in medical school suggests. “I talk to them, and after a few sessions, their fears go away and everything becomes normal. Taking photographs and the excitement when they see the cadavers happens early on. Gradually they get used to it — like every other job.”

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