TV Review: Medical drama went right to heart of the matter

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If any profession requires dry-eyed objectivity, nerves of steel and a cast-iron stomach, you would think it would be that of the surgeon.

Yet last night's Inside New Zealand documentary, Donated to Science (TV3, 9.30), which looked at dissection at Otago Medical School, was as wracked with emotion and the collywobbles as any cliff-hanger episode of a television medical drama.

The only dry eyes in the house, funnily enough, were those three clear-sighted interviewees who had decided to donate their bodies to science in the strong hope that their mortal remains would do the living a bit of good.

Some farsighted planning on the part of its makers paid off, as this intriguing documentary answered the question of why anyone in their right mind would actually want to end up as a corpse to be cut apart in a medical school dissection room.

It talked in depth to the three who had decided to donate their bodies to science - and followed a class of students through their two years of anatomy lessons.

The documentary also answered that question that makes most of the population rather squeamish: what actually happens in medical school and what motivates people to want to take a scalpel to the human body.

The students were nowhere near as dispassionate as the donors, motivated by a desire to give something back to the medical profession that had helped them or to help others learn, and with a firm conviction that their bodies were of no further use to them after death.

The students, however, were wracked with nerves as they embarked upon their hands-on anatomy lessons and we learned that the unkindest cut is indeed that tentative first wielding of the scalpel.

It is reassuringly ironic, given that today's plethora of medical and forensic dramas are usually dripping in gore and body parts, that the real thing should be so testing. "It feels like a desecration," said one of the students and, as a viewer looking on as they cut through ribs, handled hearts and kidneys, you couldn't help share that emotion.

The documentary was also a limited but fascinating insight behind the scenes at medical school, a training that remains mysterious to we lay people.

One of the most moving scenes was the service to acknowledge the donors' contribution and bring the student beneficiaries of their legacy together with the donors' grieving and sometimes bewildered loved ones.

It was well-balanced in its range of interview subjects, from the students' enthusiastic teachers waxing lyrical over the beauty of a human heart or bowel, to the donors' families and their feelings of deprivation over a funeral without their loved one's body present.

Some questions went unanswered, however, such as why Otago Medical School is one of the few that still practises dissection on human corpses.

Nor did the documentary place its subject matter in any kind of deeper cultural context.

However, it was still a worthwhile, brave and, er, incisive look at a subject normally shrouded in distaste or fear.