Learning empathy from the dead

On a Thursday afternoon in August 2008, Joe Thurman was sitting at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage museum in Oklahoma City, wearing his best suit and staring anxiously at the three empty chairs across from him. It was the end of a week-long orientation for Thurman, a first-year medical student at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. Seated at the table around him were the new classmates with whom he would share a cadaver during first-year Gross Anatomy lab. For most of the students at the table, the dissection, set to begin five weeks later, would be their first experience with the visceral textures of the human body.