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It's not as grisly as everybody thinks, insists Chris Attlee, a thirdyear medical student at Oxford University. "Once you have got used to the dissection, the anatomy becomes really interesting and you stop thinking that this is a dead person in front of you."

For the 4,600 people who begin their first year as medical students this month, one of the first things they will encounter is that everlasting font of medics' humour, the dissection room. For most, it will be the first time they have seen a body.

Anatomy teaching is changing rapidly in Britain, but medical schools are quick to emphasise that a proper understanding of how the human body fits together in three dimensions depends on studying real human tissue.

"If you want somebody to get a feel of where tissues naturally separate - one of the foundations of surgery - you have to use dissection: you can only learn about it from feeling," explains Dr Richard Boyd, Oxford University's lecturer in human anatomy.

But isn't it all horribly gruesome? Apparently not: few students feel anxious for long and, if anything, medics' black humour (which probably traces its origins back to the dissection room in the first place) provides a means of dealing with what is, after all, a rather bizarre situation in which to find yourself. Efforts are made to help people start dissecting without too much difficulty. In most medical schools, there is a gradual induction to the dissection room, with introductory talks about what is going to happen before the dissection is phased in.

The room itself is less macabre than many expect. Filled with industriouslooking groups of five or six students clustered around each cadaver, the scene is broken only by the occasional disconcerting glimpse of a student walking across the room with an arm under her arm. For the students, the dissection sessions can become very social: meeting twice a week for a year or two is the ideal opportunity to discuss what's happening in Neighbours.

Every medic knows the urban myths of dissection: the commonest is the friend of a friend who spends a year dissecting a cadaver, finally coming to the head, whereupon she rolls back the cover to discover the face of her uncle. Curiously, no one ever knows the subject of the myth first-hand.

Grisly practical jokes belong to the past, too: while older doctors can recall numerous variants of the "can you lend me a hand" visual gag, most medical students today say they are anxious to show respect for those who have chosen to leave their bodies to medical science.

So whose bodies are they, anyway? Long gone are the days when being dissected was a post mortem punishment for those who had been hanged for murder; nor any longer can you make a quick tenner by knocking off your granny and surreptitiously selling her to a medical school. Following the infamous case of Burke and Hare, two avaricious individuals who managed to knock off 16 people before they were finally caught in 1828 (Burke hanged and then publicly dissected), a series of Anatomy Acts was passed, and all cadavers now come from people who have decided to leave their bodies for this purpose.

As the cadavers are dissected, all the parts from each one are kept together; at the end, according to the wishes of the relatives, the bodies are either buried or cremated. The London teaching hospitals - more forward in this respect than many other medical schools - organise a memorial service to give recognition and thanks for those who have given their bodies, which both medical students and relatives attend. There is an address emphasising how important anatomy teaching is and how grateful the medical school and the students themselves are.

What does the future hold? Computers, having touched so many other areas of medicine, are reaching into anatomy teaching, as increasingly sophisticated software is developed which attempts to show how everything fits together in three dimensions. In some medical schools, computers are now used as an adjunct to dissection, enabling students to see before they do.

But few anatomists expect that computers will take over completely from human dissection: when it comes down to it, the computer screen is no more three-dimensional than a page in a textbook and, importantly, no computer can teach your hands to understand the functional relationships between intricate parts of the body. The odds are that as long as they themselves aren't replaced by computers, tomorrow's medical students will carry on learning anatomy through human dissection.

HM Inspector of Anatomy (telephone 071-972 4342) can provide information for people interested in leaving their bodies for medical education.

(cite provided by snopes)