Anatomy & Physiology class learns through dissection

Anatomy & Physiology class learns through dissection

Over the past couple weeks Mike Severino-Patterson’s Anatomy and Physiology class has been learning about how our bodies work by dissecting cats. We decided to dissect cats as they have many of the same organs as do humans. Students began with the worm and the frog, writing lab reports where the anatomy and physiology of the animals were compared. Students will have a quiz this week over muscles, digestive, circulatory and urogenital systems, before finishing the cat dissection with the nervous system including a brain dissection.

As one student wrote in their lab report, ” In Anatomy class, we have started doing cat dissections and even though I do not find it pleasing, we have learned quite a bit from this lesson. A brief summary of the dissection so far is this: We looked at the external body of the cat. We looked at the fur, head, mouth, ears, teeth and inside the mouth, we looked at the nose and a little of the eyes. We saw the nipples and the tail and also looked at the anus and outer genitals to identify if it was a male or female. Ours was a female. We also skinned the cat and only left fur on the head, feet, and tail. After the skinning, we took off extra fat and tried to identify some muscles like the triceps, clavotrapezius, and sartorius.”