Dissection room

At Leicester we have a fantastic purpose-built dissection room facility based in the Maurice Shock Building, next to the George Davies Centre.

The room holds in excess of 250 students and, in addition to one cadaver per eight students, has a full range of anatomical resources such as models, bones, potted specimens and the state-of-the-art Mrs H.O.R.A.C.E., which we use to teach sectional anatomy.

Medical students dissect almost the entire cadaver in their first two years at medical school, and then revisit the dissecting room in their later years to consolidate learning. Anatomical learning begins with the study of body tissues, before later dissecting whole-body systems, such as the cardiovascular and respiratory systems.

Students also have the opportunity to test their surgical skills in competing for anatomical dissecting prizes.

We have excellent IT facilities in the dissection room, including:

• Access to Apple TVs connected to large wall-mounted screens
• An audio-visual system which allows us to broadcast live dissections to all parts of the room from a central demonstration area

The dissecting room is an East Midlands regional resource for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, and as such we welcome students from other parts of the University (e.g. biological sciences), and we also host a number of external courses (e.g. orthopaedics, ultrasound and podiatry).

The facility is generously supported by members of the public in the East Midlands who donate their bodies to medical education and research.

Mrs H.O.R.A.C.E. – a collaboration with the University of Bristol

H.O.R.A.C.E. stands for Human Online Resource for Anatomical Cross-sectional Education and was produced by the University of Bristol's Centre for Applied Anatomy. He is a special cadaver which was CT-scanned and then sectioned into 75 transverse slices. Each slice was then preserved in thin perspex containers, so that they can be held and viewed physically whilst also reviewing the respective CT scan.

We now have our own such resource, also prepared by Bristol. Mrs H.O.R.A.C.E. is a female cadaver who is housed in the dissection room along with her CT images and MRIs. She is an excellent resource for students learning sectional anatomy, and also helps students to gain confidence in reading images from scans.

We welcome enquiries from prospective medical students and individuals wishing to hold a course in our facility.