Educational Media Reviews Online

Students of gross anatomy experience a unique view of the end of human life: a corpse as exploratory vessel, inert, bearing scars of chronic decline. Thomas Cole, a historian and Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, has a distinctly different view: the end of life as the average person’s final opportunity to create and collect positive karmic inheritance by donating one’s body as a training tool for future physicians. Cole and a documentary film team have collaborated to produce Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy to describe a contemporary medical school’s effort to humanize the entire process of cadaver acquisition, anatomical study, and subsequent disposal.

The film offers a mix of first person narratives from authentic participants, such as a donor from the local community of Galveston, an anatomy course instructor, a cross-section of first-year medical students flush with anatomical curiosity, and even the administrator charged with overseeing the dignified burial-at-sea of post-dissection cremated remains. Interspersed with the narratives are observations by Dr. Cole and natural scenes of Galveston’s coastline and seaport activity. There is minimal footage containing actual shots of dissection in progress, and the prospective donor Bob Harvey and medical students appear most frequently and provide their own testimonials. A somber string quartet soundtrack accompanies most scenes. A brief clip of actor Cary Grant lecturing to an anatomy class in People Will Talk (1951) opens and closes the film.

The style and organization of the film is a slow-paced meditation on life, death, and scientific inquiry through the eyes and words of Dr. Cole and the subjects. In choosing to stick with little more than the authentic impressions of the participants to guide understanding, the film editors have chosen to leave moments of questionable relevancy intact. A rather long cargo ship loading sequence is introduced in the beginning without a clue of pertinence at the time, though the purpose becomes clear in the end (barrels of cremated ashes being packed for burial at sea). Despite a build-up of alternating sequences of medical student opinions and donor narration that hold the promise of a formal intersection of science and humanism, the recorded encounter between the students and the donor is reduced to a handshake in a lab. Does this brief formality of a handshake represent the difficulty of initiating a dialogue in the circumstance or a reticence on either or both parties to want to go deeper in the encounter? Additional narration might have provided a clarification or at least questioned the motivations of the participants.

At 25 minutes, the film is short but slow moving. Soliciting donated cadavers is certainly a viable option, as demonstrated in this documentary. Whether or not a cadaver donation program is as organized as the one presented, any health care professional may be approached by a potential donor. An audience for this film exists in pre-medical and medical settings with students that ponder the fate of cadavers to the point of distraction, or as a trigger for discussion in a medical humanities or bioethics courses. Recommended for use in pre-medical and all forms of health sciences education.