To give students in the medical programs a more comprehensive look at the human anatomy, 81 students in the Pharmacy Practice and Dental Science III Honors courses will visit Bodies: The Exhibition at the Luxor. The trip will take place on Thursday, Jan. 29, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m for pharmacy students, and the day after for dental students. 

“Both programs study the human body as part of their curriculum, and I think this exhibit does a nice job of taking the body systems and explaining how things work,” Pharmacy and Dental teacher Cynthia Wong said. “The exhibits give students a fascinating view of the different body parts and systems that cannot be duplicated in a textbook.”

The exhibition has a wide variety of displays and rooms—each showcasing a different part or system of the human body.

“My favorite part of the exhibit is the Circulatory System room,” Wong said. “ The room is dark, and the exhibits in it are so colorful and beautiful. I also like to make sure my Dental students see a certain skeleton in the beginning of the exhibit to see if they can figure out how old it may be with the dentition it has.  It’s like a Forensic Dental lesson for them.” 

The Chinese government donated all the cadavers displayed in the exhibit which originally went unclaimed.

“My older brother thought it was cool because they have the bodies of real people,” senior Aikhann Casupang said. “Personally, I think it’ll be interesting to see how they’re able to preserve it. Not only that, it’s gonna be my very first time seeing actual bodies.”

A select number of specimens also illustrate health conditions such as arthritis and cirrhosis of the liver.

“I think it’s pretty important seeing this kind of brutal stuff,” senior Anganell Johnson said. “[Nursing] clinicals really opened my eyes because I got to see a lot of the down and dirty stuff, and I knew how to help these people with things like that. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t really understand the hardships that people would go through and stuff like that.”

Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, students are encouraged to navigate the exhibition from an educational perspective and to treat each display with courtesy.

“I don’t put up with any students mocking the exhibits,” Wong said. “This field trip is a privilege. I let my students know what the field trip is about and that they will be viewing actual preserved human bodies. I expect the students to be respectful of these bodies and to take this opportunity to learn something new.”