After taking Anatomy in the Fall semester, we spent two days in February at Weill Cornell Medicine’s cadaver lab. There, under the guidance of two Cornell anatomy instructors, we were able to examine partially dissected cadavers and get a real grasp of how structures appeared outside the textbooks as well as their relationships to adjacent structures. Listed below are some observations I found intriguing.

• Spinal Cord – Smaller caliber than I expected. It was interesting to see how the dorsal/ventral spinal roots emerge as well as the cauda equina.
• Aorta – Larger caliber than I expected. At the same time, the walls were much thinner; I had imagined it to be a very thick-walled, muscular tube.
• Radial Pulse – I’ve since found it much easier to find after seeing where I should be palpating in relation to the palmaris longus tendon.
• Gallbladder – After seeing it colored green in all the textbooks and having it be green as well on the cadaver, I thought it would be green in a living person. Glad that the instructor cleared up that the color change occurs postmortem, and it should be pink when doing surgery.
• Nutcracker Syndrome – We got a very good visual demonstration of nutcracker syndrome, where the left renal vein is compressed by pressure from the abdominal aorta and SMA.
• Prostate – Gave me a good idea of how far up we should expect to go before palpating the prostate on DREs.
• Femoral Triangle – Got to see what the E (empty space) part of NAVEL actually is.