Dissection, prosection or both in teaching medical gross anatomy: An old question revisited

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Thorough knowledge and understanding of human body which is foundation to medicine, partly comes from dissection. Dissection helps develop anatomical knowledge, value 3‐D relationships and normal variation, mental mapping for integration, motor skill and promotes empathy and professionalism. Now in medical education, the role of dissection is questioned and reevaluated due to diminished curriculum time, cost and availability of alternate teaching tools. In US, while no school has completely eliminated dissection many have included prosection and other teaching aids to teach anatomy. There is no definite answer to the superiority of one approach over the other. Often prosections are peer taught. In 2010 as part of TBL pedagogy, we adopted prosections to teach head and neck anatomy to medical students. In contrast to peer teaching, our small group teaching is faculty led for a period of 4 weeks with 2–3 case based discussion sessions. Students’ received focused study guide and periodic quizzes with immediate feedback. We evaluated the effectiveness of this approach analyzing students’ exam performance and course evaluation. Students performed as well or slightly better than the classes who dissected head and neck. Better performance could be due to more available study time and faculty led small group teaching. Analysis of the results and our approach will be detailed in the presentation.