At the medical school where one of us was teaching, a first year medical student came running out of the anatomy class, saying that he could not bear to see a dead body. The smell of formalin and the cadaver disturbed him. He felt that he had joined the medical field to see life, not a dead human body. It was a genuine reaction for a student to have on seeing a cadaver for the first time, in the grim environment of an anatomy department.