Eduardo de O. Costa¹; Marcos Roberto Campos Jr²; Gerson Odilon Pereira3; Diogo Nilo Miranda Borba4; Cláudia de Melo Ferreira5; Diêgo Lucas Ramos e Silva6 (eduardodeocostaal@gmail.com)
¹,² Medical student of the Federal University of Alagoas; 3 Medical Specialist in Forensic Medicine;4Forensic Doctor; 5Forensic Dentist; 6Phonoaudiologist and Anatomy monitor.
The current work aims to look into the donations of cadavers to the Medical School of Alagoas, potential donations not realized and their impact to medical training. In this aspect, the following work is presented in the form of documentary research, from an analysis of the records and cadaveric reports of the Medico-Legal Institute of Alagoas in 2015. As potential donors, were considered those that had the clinical cause of death as diagnosis of the cause of death, as well as those who have presented interrogation of the legal nature of the death, therefore narrowing our results to a total of 65 corpses, of which only three were donated. In this context, when it comes to donating bodies, Law Nº 8501 of November 30th 1992 stablishes, among other regulations, that all corpses not claimed within 30 days may be destined for medical research. However, one cannot disregard the issue of respect to dignity when combining scientific advancement and legal access to the use of corpses. Based on these aspects, the legislation that governs donation of remains is the first item to be considered. Non-vilification of the body is another important aspect, to be observed mainly by future doctors who manipulate the deceased. The deceased have such great value to the study of anatomy that medical undergraduate students perform a ceremony of tribute to the corpse at their end of the medical degree. Unfortunately, the use of corpses by educational institutions has been limited not only by the shortage of indigents in a current globalized world, where almost everyone has documents, but also by the structural difficulty of some Medico-Legal Institutes that will not allow the difficult task of preserving the body for 30 days, as the law demands. So it is that the bad conditioning of corpses – a reflex either of insufficient investments from Social Security departments or of a demand for this service that exceeds the capacity – precipitates the natural decomposition of the bodies, causing the potential donor to be lost. In this case, medical students lose in learning; the society loses in health. Finally, only one thing is preserved in this story: the original meaning of the word cadaver – meat donated to the worms.
REFERENCES:
FRANÇA, G. Forensic Medicine. 7th ed. Ed. Guanabara Koogan. Rio de Janeiro, 2004.
MARSO. LA, T. R. P. S. Voluntary donation of bodies for anatomical study. 2013. 121 f. Thesis (Doctorate in Sciences). University of São Paulo, SP, 2013.
MEDICO-LEGAL INSTITUTE ESTÁCIO OF LIMA. Corpse Registration Books. Maceió, AL, 2015.
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