Department head calls incident ‘terrible’
Medical students at a Swedish university were stunned when they discovered that the subject of their first-ever autopsy was a former instructor. “I was super-shocked,” one of the students at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, said. Although it is standard practice for students to be told ahead of time who they will be autopsying, students say that did not happen in this case, and only discovered who the corpse was when they saw the toe-tag. “It was extremely unfortunate. This is the first time I have encountered something like this,” Chief Physician Birgitta Sundelin who was supervising the students, said. Department head Tina Dalianis said students need to learn to cope with it. “It is really terrible, but it is part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they must deal with it,” she said.