==JAPAN: KM== [Medical themes]

When I entered the room，a strong and strange smell I had not experienced stung my nose．This smell made me a little dizzy．I had experienced smells of organic solvents sometimes，but I didn't know how I should explain this smell． Looking into the room before me,　there were a lot of dead bodies on the dissecting tables. They didn't look like what I had thought people should. Instead they looked like mummies and I could not believe that they were once alive. I found that such a strange smell came from them.
This room was the prosection practice room for medical students who learn about the structures of man's body and how they work. In our medical university, the prosection practice is done in the second year. I am a 1st year student, but I was invited to come to the room and to see the prosection practice by a 2nd year student.
It was not the first time for me to see a dead body, but when I stood in front of the entrance door, I felt some fear and tension. "What is fear?" I said to myself, but I could not find the answer. In the room, about twenty dead bodies were on the prosection tables and each dead body was surrounded by five or six students. The students were cutting the dead body's skin or dissecting adipose tissue. If you did not know that it was a prosection practice, you would think it looked like excavation of ruins.
I could not feel signs or indications from these dead bodies which would make me feel they were once alive. I don't know the reason why they give me such an impression. I wonder if they were dipped so long in formalin that I could not feel the vital spark which they once had.
Almost all the dead bodies were elderly people. Their skin color had turned brown and almost every dead body was thin. I wondered what kinds of lives they had lived. How many members did they have in their families? Did they have husbands, wives or children? What kinds of careers did they engage in? Did they have any dreams or hopes? They reminded me of my grandfather, grandmother, and other relatives who have passed away. Now my father is seventy years old. I wondered if after my father passed away he would look like them. So I did not think they were people with whom I had no concern and I felt an attachment to them.
Someday we will die, too, and someday we will be dead bodies like them. To become a body donor, the donor's expression of a desire to become a body donor and his or her family's consent must be required. Why did these people want to become body donors? I think the man or woman who wants to become a body donor has a strong will or hope that his or her body will be helpful to bring up medical students to be good doctors. And I think their idea to become body donors is the last contribution they can make to the society by which they had been taken care of until their death. Their decisions are not made for some special people, but rather are done unconditionally, and are a pure tribute of their love.
To learn the constructions of the human body, prosection practice is thought to be an essential and inevitable subject. I think so, but if I were asked to become a body donor, I should hesitate to do so. I think probably most people will hesitate, because they think that their dead bodies will be treated like beef or pork.
I think the donors' bravery commands our admiration because we can not easily become one. So we medical students should have respect for the donors' good intentions. To make the most of the donors' good intentions, we should practice and study hard to become good doctors. We should learn the human dignity of life and death through the prosection practice because we medical students will become doctors who are entrusted with patients' health and lives in the future

"Getting It Together"

For the first time I saw a prosection practice, I thought that almost all the remains were very old people and I wondered what kind of ideas impelled them to donate their bodies.　When I resigned from my work and decided to become a medical student, my father, who was 70 years old, said to me. "Most of my classmates died in World War �U without doing what they wanted to do. You are living in an age when you can do anything you want to do. So you should do what you want to do." It seemed that the remains said the same words to me. So I decided to write about this topic.