The civic-run tuberculosis hospital in Sewri has emerged as the main source of unclaimed bodies being used as cadavers in medical colleges attached to KEM, Sion, and Nair hospitals and the newly opened college attached to Cooper Hospital. The stigma around the infectious disease continues to leave a large number of patients unattended in the hospital, and many unclaimed after death.
In 2014, the hospital had 71 unclaimed bodies. In 2015, there were 62, and 45 the following year. Till April this year, 13 bodies lay unclaimed at the hospital. While the figures show a decline, doctors say that it not necessarily indicate a trend as TB treatment has spread out in multiple centres in the past few years. Dr. Daksha Shah, BMC’s TB officer said, “The reason for abandonment of patients varies. Most of the patients we get are from poor families, there are patients who are brought from the roadside and are detected with the disease. They have no relatives.”
As per protocol, the unclaimed bodies are preserved in the mortuary for a span of three weeks till a claimant comes forward. When no one turns up, necessary paperwork is carried out and the bodies are sent to the medical colleges. A few are taken up by NGOs and others by individuals who carry out the last rites. “At times, relatives turn up years later to get the death record. It is mostly to settle property matters,” said a senior doctor.
‘Good training method’
“In medical colleges, MBBS students get to use these bodies to learn about the human body: its structure, muscles, joints and other minute details through dissection,” said Dr. Avinash Supe, dean of KEM Hospital. He added that cadaveric training is a very good method of teaching. Doctors say for undergraduate students, the bodies can be used as long as six months and more than 40 students can be trained using one cadavers.
According to Dr. Shashikant Masal, head of the ENT department at Cooper Hospital, which recently inaugurated a cadaver laboratory, students get hands-on experience and don’t commit errors later when they deal with an actual patient. “For example, I teach my students endoscopic sinus surgery on the cadaver. In this procedure, we have to hold an endoscope in one hand and another instrument in the other. A slight mistake in judgement means disaster as you could damage the brain or the eyes. So students learn to stabilise their hand movement by training on the cadavers,” said Dr. Masal. She added that the hospital has undertaken workshops on laparoscopic shoulder procedures, endoscopic ENT procedures, and spine surgeries.
KEM Hospital gets 50 unclaimed bodies a year. Half of them are brought in by the police and the remaining are bodies of patients lying unclaimed at the hospital. Nair Hospital gets about 30 bodies, and Sion close to 90. In both hospitals, 50% of the bodies are brought in by the police while the remaining are unclaimed bodies in their own wards.
