Founded in 331 BCE by Alexander, and later florishing under the Ptolemaic rulers, the great center of Greek learning attracted great minds in many different fields, including medicine. It was here that Herophilos uncovered secrets about the pulse and its origin, and Erasistratos made remarkable distinctions concerning the brain and the heart. And once the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle on the separation of the body and soul after death became well known and accepted, it became a regular and legal practice to use dead bodies for discovery and educational purposes. The ability to use bodies to learn about anatomy greatly improved our knowledge then, and the same method is still used in medical schools today.
Now ready for academic release, the virtual reality system which involves all senses, including touch, will be implemented in many of the major medical schools around the world. This new system will be used in place of the traditional cadavars in gross anatomy, allowing students to individually investigate the human anatomy from a virtual reality lab. This release comes as a great relief to the administrators of medical schools everywhere. With the dramatic increase in the average life span, as well as the prevalence of artificial organs, the scarcity of whole, natural cadavers is increasing at a rapid rate.
Programmers and Surgeons hope this new system may be further developed to aid researchers in the testing of new procedures and devices.
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Medical Students No Longer Take Gross Anatomy in a Class Room
Additionally, students may have the opportunity to practice surgery using this system, thereby giving them experience with acutal surgical procedures before ever having to walk into an O.R. A series of O.R. and E.R. programs have been developed, allowing a student to experience many different surgical situations before ever being licensed to practice medicine. The program allows the operator to adjust the environment, the patient, and the status of the patient, thereby creating a countless array of possiblities.