I went to a standard comprehensive secondary school in Warwickshire, outside of Birmingham, England. I should have probably gone on to study medicine but I studied anatomy instead. I had quite driven parents who were encouraging me to become a doctor, but I decided to do something a bit more creative.
I spent five years teaching science in the northwest of England and then I saw an opportunity to use my skills to help more students take an interest. I thought the best way to engage young people especially in the sciences was with guts and gore. That worked with my background.
I set up a company and spent the first few years doing medical workshops. From there I have ended up working across all kinds of different disciplines. Now we are doing a nationally touring simulated autopsy event. It focuses on the dissection of a semi-synthetic cadaver. We get everybody from doctors and consultants to postmen coming along.
There’s a lot of red tape around using real human tissue for various different reasons. We thought, “What’s the next best thing when it comes to producing something that can we can move around and be able to simulate the same experience of dissecting a human body?”
So, we worked with some of the special effects guys that make items for the BBC and spent a couple of months in a workshop creating the anatomical models that we use today. The bodies are made of silicone and the organs all come from pigs. They are fairly similar to human organs. Obviously, pig organs are abundantly available. We take offal—the organs of butchered animals—from the meat industry.
In each show, we have one central cadaver and we create a backstory about who the individual is and they present various different clinical symptoms. Then we simulate the post-mortem and get the audience to help solve the case based on the evidence that’s provided.
We simulate the tissue damage that you’d expect to see from the illness the individual has with special effects. It’s all designed to be a problem solving exercise for the audience as they are following along.
People do pass out every now and again at the shows. Obviously, we give them first aid. And we do have a crash mat. But the people who come all have some sort of genuine interest. Sometimes, their interest is in how the body works, or some of them are training in anatomy. Some of them have even got medical conditions.
We change the show content twice a year, and one year we ran a show that was based on a road traffic collision, and a gentleman who had been hit by a motorbike flew from Sydney, Australia, all the way to Manchester and then came up to Glasgow to see the event.
For 10 hours of his life he had blacked out and he wanted to know what happened to him and how he survived. The whole show centered around the moment of an accident all the way through to recovery—what is the sequence of events that would lead to life or death afterwards.
No one else has developed semi-synthetic cadavers like ours, and getting approval to use animal organs is complex. Offal from slaughterhouses is highly regulated in terms of tracking and tracing for disposal to prevent the spread of disease. You can go into your butcher and pick up certain bits that are food standard, but the regulations control quantities over 20 kilograms (44 pounds)—and we plough through tons.
It took us 12 months to get a licence to use offal in the way that we do, and it’s not just something anybody can do—to be able to go to the slaughterhouse, get the organs and then be able to use them at the scale that we do.
We are inspected twice a year by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra)— they had to change some of the regulatory frameworks that govern the way that offal is dealt with to allow us to use pig organs in our shows.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, one of the ways I managed to survive was to undertake live streams. We had quite a large following on our online channel.
In these shows, we did a six-part series where we actually dissected a real human body in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital. We managed to get COVID-secure access to a lab in a hospital and we did a real six part dissection with a follow-along component, as well. So, you could order pig organs—not real human organs—and we posted them to people’s home addresses so they could dissect along with the show at home.
Every year, I do a real human body dissection with one of the NHS trusts that I work with. That’s done behind closed doors. It’s mainly for my own development. And, I make sure all my team see the full human body dissection every year.
My work is providing an opportunity for health care professionals. We tend to find that we get a lot of health care professionals that come to us and say, “I’ve learned more in these four hours than I learnt in three years at university.”
Most universities don’t have the facilities and the resources to be able to meet the criteria to get hold of human body parts. There are only a handful of universities in the U.K. that have dissection labs. Human specimens are typically reserved for doctors.
Doctors aren’t really our target audience. They get proper cadeveric dissections by leading professors. The auxiliary staff and the allied health care professionals, which make up 80 percent of the workforce, don’t. Being able to widen the scope in terms of access to actually seeing anatomy is only going to improve their skills. There’s really only so much you can learn on an iPad.
Samuel Piri is a human anatomist and expert in technical dissection of real specimens. Piri delivers training to schools, colleges, universities and hospitals. His company ITAE Productions hosts events focused on live dissections. Piri and his team have developed VIVIT—the world’s only semi-synthetic human cadaver.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
