Kids are weird
Shitposting"Scrubs" is generally regarded as one of the most accurate medical tv shows and in it all the morticians are always eating lollipops because it makes it easier to ignore the smell
You know why plague doctors had those iconic beak-shaped masks? The beak is stuffed with aromatic herbs to drown out the smell of the infected, but also out of the belief that it blocked the "bad air" of the disease.
They also got sick less, but not from that. Their wax covered robes stopped ticks from getting on them.
They were kinda like really really early hazmat suits, with the beak being intended to act as some sort of filter.
Of course they couldn't have known about germs but they did know that being around sick people and/or rotting animals unprotected tended to make them sick.
Well, it probably did help. They've protected all their mucous membranes from direct exposure to airborn pathogens, made it so you can't touch your eyes or mouth with infected materials, and the mask is packed with frequently replaced fibrous materials that probably block or trap some particles. The suit itself It also draws air from under the beak, which ensures that particles have to travel upwards to get into your mouth - but most infectious particles naturally travel out and down, not up.
A rather classic case of the ring solution to the right answer
Their robes were almost good enough to stop you catching the black death. Literally just the ankles being exposed was the problem.
ticks
Fleas š«”
Iām a nurse, and youāll always find a couple nurses who have some peppermint or neroli oil in the bags. A couple drops in a mask and youāre good to go through whatever awful mess you need to clean up.
I might have to take up that habit. My gag reflex has been playing up a lot since I got Covid and some smells that I could have easily ignored before now have me retching.
There is a definite difference between dissecting a fresh body and a preserved anatomical cadaver specimen.
As a bio major I had a couple labs where I did dissections and another where I handled dead specimens to be able to ID them. Now Iām not a vegan or anything and those classes made me very Not hungry. One of the dissection classes was actually right before a break that was my only chance to have lunch until late in the evening and I would always have to go take a lil walk or do something else after to get to a point where I could eat š
I feel like if I were the bio teacher and we were doing fish I'd try and get fresh fish from the grocery store - that way we could eat them after. Is there a reason to use formaldehyde besides preservation?
Mostly just preservation afaik. If they're preserved in formaldehyde, you don't have to use it immediately. You can bulk buy it and store it for months/years until you need it.
Good to know. I feel like you could just use better timing especially as the scalpels get tossed each time, but I get why they donāt do that.
The preservatives make it easier to dissect to see the structures too. The muscles separate easier because it makes the tissue firmer. The connective tissue between muscles turns in to a sort of fibrous cobwebby texture too, so it's easier to get through. The scalpels don't get tossed either, they need fresh blades but the rest of it gets washed and reused.
I've cut up a lot of fresh meat for cooking and I've done a lot of dissections for my bio degree. I'm currently taking anatomy and dissecting a cat so the info is pretty fresh in my mind.
we did that when i was in middle school, the fish had been bought in the local fish market that same morning and after the dissection it was fried and eaten
I prepare dissections for a school. No way anyone would be eating meat that was left out on tables and poked and prodded by students!
yeah most dissections i did the other people in the room LOST their appetite. i was a vegetarian and thatās how i was chill eating my food, a lot of the others would go to their meal, see meat, and just pale
Funny. The one dissection I attended in high school didnāt really affect me either way. I just found it interesting. I think it was a chicken heart? Some asshole in my group broke a scalpel being stupid and the look on the teacherās face was āyouāre next on the table.ā
the ones like chicken hearts didnāt impact most people in my class, it was mostly the cat we worked on for like weeks (to be clear, not one cat for the entire class) and then iāve worked in some cadaver labs which can be a lot
Mh. Yeah, that would be much more likely to provoke a reaction, I should think.
dissections always made me so nauseous i couldn't eat for a few hours afterwards. IDK how there's suddenly so many people that get hungry
Yeah, I can't relate at all to the hunger bit. The smell of formaldehyde makes me feel like vomiting. I'd honestly rather dissect "unpreserved" specimens, speaking as a biologist who has dealt with many long-dead, definitely not preserved animal carcasses. I mean, they don't smell good, but they don't make me nearly as sick to my stomach.
My first experiences with necropsies were done on "natural" recently deceased animals. The first time I dissected a preserved fetal pig was immensely more disgusting.
Dealing with formaldehyde pretty much guarantees I won't be eating at all that day.
In college I did necropsies on unpreserved animals ā marine mammals ā and also took an anatomy course with preserved human cadavers and lemme tell ya the smell of those necropsies is still the worst thing Iāve ever been exposed to.
The human cadaver lab techs would mix the formalin with fabric softener to āimproveā the smell but then it just smells like flowery chemicals and death.
Still better than a decaying marine mammal though. By a lot.
The smell of formaldehyde pretty much kills any appetite
100%! Formaldehyde is the worst!
In middle school we did squids and the teacher brought in a hotplate to cook them after.
The smell of raw meat is so good though, red meat especially
Formalin doesn't make me hungry but acetone based paint thinners? oh yeah.
Me too
Fish dissections don't smell great, but the rat did make me hungry.
Its the formaldehyde. It triggers the hunger sensation. Would leave anatomy dissection class craving roast pork.
Yep, everyone who teaches cadaver-based medical anatomy warns folks about the "formaldehyde munchies".
See the worst bit is that preserved flesh looks a lot like roast meat. And it makes you feel weird and gross but man the roast meat and gravy always hits the spot after
This has the same vibe as an EMT going "yeah his head was severed from his body, or, I suppose what was left of his body. Now I'm hungry let's go get some ribs"
That was me watching Hannibal. I'd get so frickin' ravenous during it, and the grosser the gore the worse it'd get. I remember during the social worker in the horse episode I just had to pause the episode to order a mountain of vindaloo.
this is so hilarious "Peter, is that your social worker in that horse?"
As someone who works in emergency medicine, I can have come from the gnarliest case and still chow down while discussing the consistency of the pus or poo.
I canāt imagine working around a dead human and then being like ādamn I really crave some meatā.
I have lived it.
Some people get nauseous from formaldehyde, and if you're opening the abdomen, your appetite will usually go away. After one freshly dead dude the entire class swore off ravioli.
Other cases? Damn, even thinking back I'm getting mighty hungry for a steak.
The existence of Formaldehyde implies the existence of Casualdejekyll.
Lmao good one
Can't say I came up with. The source though is lost to time and my laziness to track it down
This made my day thank you š
I was told it's the Raw Meatā¢ activating the lizard brain, and two of my university professors attested to the fact that watching post mortems used to make them hungry. I've not been exposed to formaldehyde that I can remember but I'd imagine it smells the opposite of hunger inducing lol.
Idk, Tbh I don't find raw meat or formaldehyde to be terribly appetising.
Now salt, On the other hand, Or anything crystalline, For that matter... Gotta munchy dose rocks!
When I was a kid I did this extracurricular summer learning thing and every year I would do the dissection track because fuck yeah. My fondest memory from these lessons was that on the last day, instead of ordering formaldehyde-soaked specimens, the teacher would bring in fresh squid from the supermarket so we could make homemade calamari after the dissection.
So speaking as someone who has not only eaten their dissection but made a proper meal out of it: What the fuck. Are you trolling?
Right? Never once have I considered eating a specimen preserved in formaldehyde. And I had to be around it a lot for my herpetology class. Stuff gives you a headache after an hour of being forced to breathe it.
right like have y'all ever *smelled" formaldehyde ughhh gfhb yum yum
Depends on a person. I always got the munchies. Another person nearly passed away each time and was hanging out near the windows
I'm ngl I was memeing in that comment formaldehyde is such a fucking awful smell lfmdmakslaj
I personally quite like it, but I was in the minority.
You could always tell who headed from the anatomy lab by the smell lingering on them.
Absolutely true, but it can be other stuff as well. Did a stint in an embryology lab in college, but was working around various preserved and unpreserved animal specimens. My job was to get as much of the flesh and other soft tissue off of some skeletons we were prepping, and I was always starving after. Not during, half-rotted flesh is not that appetizing, but afterwards.
Also, cooking brains smell like bacon. It's easier to remove brains after you cook the skeleton than before and they smell so much like bacon.
I used to be SO DAMN HUNGRY after anatomy class.
iām struggling with my appetite nowadays, should i get some formaldehyde and sniff some on a wet cloth to get my ghrelin going?
I mean. Weed is the cheaper and less carcinogenic option?
i guess with the munchies and all? weed isnāt legal where i live, so yea.. thanks for the suggestion tho
Haha I do suppose formaldehyde is more legal.
Oh so Scully chowing down on a pizza mid autopsy is actually a realistic and normal thing to do
I wonder if in a few years, someone will read this and wonder why the artist drew their mouths like that - even took me a second to realize they're wearing masks
I thought they all had worms in their mouths.
Aussie here:
what the fuck. why do y'all get to do cool shit in bio, whereas we're down here looking at cells and shit.
we're down here looking at cells and shit
Well, you were a penal colony after all.
That's actually really good
You know whatās crazy? We do that AND look at cells
Another Aussie: We got to disect sheep hearts and livers.
I scared my group by singing a variation of Mary had a little lamb while cutting.
Hey my school dissected sheep hearts too! And I broke my scalpel cause I was an edgy teenager who wanted to stab and kill and bleed things
For some reason my middle school (US) dissected owl pellets? Like itās a hard shell and you open it and itās got the fur and bones and whatever part of their prey they couldnāt digest. Iāve never met anyone else who did that in school.
i did this too! they let us keep the bones
same here!
I did this in elementary school! We also observed (live) crawfish
Well itād be pretty boring to observe dead crawfish lmao Thatās cool tho!
I did this too! Got to keep a mouse skull. I wrapped it in tissues and a sticky note to try to keep it from breaking in my bag.
I did this but iirc it was just the 'advanced' class that did it. Like, a couple times a week they'd pull like 20 kids out of their normal classes and we'd do other stuff. I remember a lot of logic puzzles, but I'm sure we did other stuff too. Once we did the Myers-Briggs test.
Iām sorry but pairing logic with Myers-Briggs is really funny
yeah, but it was like 2009 and we were like 12 so
Brazilian here and same wtf
i mean, we do that too. we do a LOT of that. I only dissected a frog once in middle school for compulsory science class. Any other dissections I did were because I took a specific anatomy science class. (U.S.)
I think the topic of the post answers your question.
Maybe only tangentially related, but one of my classmates in middle school biology either tried to or succeeded in decapitating the frog we were dissecting even thought that was not at all part of the assignment.
So I guess just being around the dead meat makes people act weird in general.
And kids are weird.
I kept a few parts from my middle school bio class. Still have em in a little jar of formaldehyde
Yet another crazy thing that America has: biology class autopsies.
Wish we had those, I only seen that stuff in cartoons
Edit: I didn't say that "only America has autopsies in school". Of course that's not true. It's just my personal american stereotype, because, as a child, most cartoons I've seen were from America (and the rest were soviet or russian cartoons). I don't know anything about schools in any other foreign country, besides Japan I guess.
We had them in the UK too.
I think recently budget cuts means that only the teacher does them and the class gathers around to watch, but I remember dissecting a sheep's eye.
Canada too. We did a pig heart. Except ours hadnt defrosted soo good, so it was more butchery than dissection.
BOT ALERT WEE WOO
Bazinga
Same! Age 15-16, one pig's heart, one sheep's eye. The heart went fine, other than my science partner nearly fainting. I handled most of the work anyways, since I'd gotten it in my head that I wanted to be a coroner or someone that handles autopsies around that time, for some reason.
Sheep's eye was a little more problematic, but fine enough. I'd left my autopsy phase behind and was also horrifically squeamish around eye related trauma, so had to wait for my partner (Different kid than before) to get the big parts out for me to handle until it no longer resembled an eye and I could work better. One group in front of us tried to have a figgt with the eye, and one girl accidentally shot a jet of pupil juice or something at her partner, drenching her shirt in eye fluid. Lovely.
14-15, we dissected frogs. I was super interested, thought id love to be a coroner or something. I was totally fine with everything after, except at the start when we had to break its jaw. I know it was already dead, but like, i felt really guilty about it.
Still super interesting, dont think I could do it again though.
Oh, absolutely. Looking back, I feel far too sympathetic for animals to ever dissect one fully. Could never handle a frog like that :(
I did it in Germany, but we were all 17-19 and had biology as a major. We also only did it because our teacher decided to do it, not because it's the norm. We also didn't dissect worms or frogs, we dissected cow organs.
Same here in the Netherlands. Our school usually used musk rats, because they had a deal with the guy that killed them to protect the dikes. Our year didn't have that, so we got fish and a few stillborn lambs.
Protect the what?
The dikes.
Iām surprised that isnāt the norm in other countries given that the US isnāt really on the cutting edge of education. We dissected frogs in middle school.
I'm from Vietnam and my class dissect shrimps one
Oddly enough Iām American and my school didnāt do any dissections !
I only got to do it once but I was forced to miss out on it because I was missing a shitload of work and had to make up for it.
My grandpa died that month so I wasnāt very able to focus on my classes at the time
Lmao we had that... But worse cause we had to procure the fish, bird and mouse and then kill it with our own hands via deadly amount of sleepy gas.
Honestly I was expecting something more crazy from the replies to this considering our school did a human leg or arm every few years lol
As a veterinary student in his freshman who's been studying anatomy for half a semester at this point, I'm not afraid to admit that it has made me kinda hungry for big pieces of meat at least twice. The fact that it ends right before lunchtime doesn't help either.
Shut up to the artist for being able to convey confused bemusement through a mask.
EDIT: That was supposed to say "Shout out," I used text-to-speech and didn't notice.
The eyes are so reminiscent of that depressed oompa loompa pic going around
Wasn't there a post here a while back about how EMS had to be told that it's normal to smell corpses that had been burnt to death and get hungry? Like the smell of cooking meat, human or otherwise, triggers a hunger response?
It is? Because I came across a fatal accident scene once and have been questioning my humanity since.
Yes. You're not a monster if you felt hungry or even just thought of cooked meat. It's normal. We're omnivores and that includes eating meat, which means we'll associate the smell of it with food. You're still a good person.
I didn't know how much I needed to hear that, thank you.
my hungry ass could never be a mortician
I refused to do a frog dissection in class because I love frogs. My teacher and I argued but eventually she sent me an online, virtual dissection to do instead for equal marks. I did the virtual dissection and all the work, and she still gave me a 0 for 'not participating.' Fuck you, Ms Too Old To Be Wearing A Tight Leather Skirt.
Great. Now I'm hungry
Had an anatomy lab once, and in my culture we eat parts of the animal like intestines, liver, etc. My tummy grumbled and I felt so guilty about it, but I chalked it up to it being because Iād only ever seen organs in a culinary way and as animal byproducts so my mind associated it with mealtime.
I wasnāt the only one who felt this way either.
Truly bizarre experience.
Autopsy note - when you use the bone saw it smells like Fritos
wait is that a real thing that happens to people?
Asking around in my (human) dissection class taught me that thereās 2 types of people: - get the munchies - canāt eat for another 2 h after
There is a secret third option: extremely hungry but feel too sick and uncomfortable to eat
huh, interesting
Iām in a 5th grade classroom today. Theyāre writing 5-paragraph opinion essays. Selected topics include:
tacos are the best food
school uniforms vs street clothes
play Roblox
Osama Bin Laden is the worst terrorist to ever exist
I should have a cell phone
I will say that dissecting a cow heart in high school did make me want to eat one.
Did you get any kids asking you to tell them what to write about? I've had that as a substitute teacher, where the kids seemed to have no confidence in their own ability to have ideas.
No, but Iāve also never subbed on the day an in-class essay is assigned. This was like the tail end of it
I started out going, āYeah, as someone who worked as an educator for 15 years, the war between needing to say āfuckā and needing to stay employed is REAL.ā I let out one f-bomb over those 15 years, but thankfully it was at a table with three high schoolers who just thought it was really funny that I turned red and covered my mouth and asked them not to tell anyone. (And they didnāt.)
ā¦.and then this turned into potential cannibalism aaaaaaand nope. Thatās enough Reddit today.
My hungry ass could not be a coal miner.
I think the take away here is that people, are weird.
During the winter months, which were half of them because Canada, I ate a lot of icicles. Like, a lot of icicles. I called them winter carrots. Anyway, more often than not those icicles had stuff in them that made me spew chunks. Bird crap, bacteria, mud, whatever.
I remember this one time, core memory, I swallowed a squirt of hand sanitizer, and then I read the label it contained alcohol. From casual conversation I knew that alcohol can be lethal to kids, so I raised my hand, went to the bathroom, and broke down because I thought I was going to die.
God my kid days were fucking weird. I had to be hospitalized because I ate a whole bottle of childrenās Tylenol because I liked the grape flavour, I was almost the reason behind an amber alert, I was ready to break my legs for candy, I was a blooming pyromaniac, I found a legitimate bomb 3 blocks from my school, half of my teachers hated me, but Iām here at 24 and ready to make it a lot of peopleās problem.
hi for the love of god elaborate on that last paragraph?
What specifically?
the amber alert, the breaking legs, the fucking bomb???
Wellā¦from start to bottom
The hospitalization is straightforward, I had to get my stomach pumped.
I went āmissingā because my sister didnāt hear me when I said I was heading out for a bit, even though I remember TELLING HER, and getting A VERBAL CONFIRMATION, and the area surrounding my house wasnāt the safest, I was gone for two hours because I biked to my school on a Saturday.
In grade 6 I was dared by someone to jump off the top of the playground, which was likeā¦12ft I think, I botched the landing and dislocated my fucking leg. But I got some gummy Coke bottles out of it.
I had a magnifying glass I āborrowedā from the science class in grade 5, still have it to this day, I liked to burn leaves, sticks, ants, that continued for 4 years until I got bored.
Grade 7 they found a āsuspicious packageā at a bus stop 3 blocks away from school, they locked down the building, and it exploded. It was a paint bomb. No one was injured, but there was a splotch of paint stuck there for a few days until they cleaned it up. Yeah, I said I found it, I misremembered it, the cops got a call.
I was a fucking shithead until I was 18, total asshole. I got a lot of people to hate me. Including teachers.
I think thatās it.
Apparently formaldehyde its an appetite stimulant.
Like some built-in scavenger instinct associating cutting up/open a corpse with getting food out of it.
A lot of dissection specimens sold to schools have less toxic fixatives but still some formaldehyde for this reason.
When I was in high school a student severed the arm of the dissection frog and asked others to high five it.
Can confirm that the formaldehyde smellā¢ makes you HUNGRY. I got the privilege of working with preserved human remains and felt a great sense of existential unease from looking at the skinned remains of someone's grandma and craving a sandwich...
I went to one of those anatomical exhibitionsāthe one with bodies flayed and preserved in interesting positionsāand after twenty minutes all I wanted was to eat my entire body weight in bacon and ham.
Formaldehyde makes people hungry?? How??? It smells awful! Not once did I ever dissect a sea cucumber and think anything other than āthis is disgusting and awfulā
Ngl i sometimes have rlly dark thoughts bout eating dead things that arenāt store bought and i genuinely cant tell if thatās intrusive thoughts or if i actually want that.
This did not happen to me when I was doing dissections in biology class but I'll take their word for it.Ā
This is why marine biology is better, the smell of the thing youāre dissecting is so bad that you lose your appetite
It works for animal autopsies too. I worked as a technician helping dissect animals to find out why they died for seven years. Everybody who didnāt work there was grossed out, but those who did never had trouble eating lunch. The days we had cows I did crave burgers.
That said, carnivorous animals were less likely to cause the munchies and how long it had been dead mattered a lot.
As someone who has dissected animals before, what the fuck yāall get HUNGRY FROM IT????? WHAT THE HELL
I worked in a morgue. Formaldehyde is an appetite stimulant. The smell literally triggers the āeatā part of the brain. Until I learned that I felt real bad thoughā¦no I never ate anyone
Hey, what the fuck?
Isnāt this drawn by the person whose problem solving skills are lacking?
Vegans in shambles rn
negligence huh? you just ate the whole fucking colon didnt you
little nibbleā¢ļø
For some reason yea I just get hungry being around dead things. Thereās gore art that I see and it just makes me hungry.
Am a teacher, can confirm the hardest part of the job is not being able to say āwhat the fuckā
Absolutely true for me.
Anatomy classes at the medical uni? Gods, I went out hungy af.
The salivating is real. Dissecting those muscles? Damn, man I really, really, really want a steak now.
Juicy red meat will do that to ya.
Iām in a dissection lab class this semester. What on fucking earth do you mean it makes you hungry. What the fuck.
Iāve never had less of an appetite than after that class, between the preservative smell and the āchopping open someoneās rib cage to pull their lungs out.ā
The top comment chain on this post is people asking what the fuck is wrong with the original posters and the very next one is people agreeing with the post and explaining that the smell of formaldehyde can in fact make you hungry and even recalling their own experiences with the "formaldehyde munchies".
The entire thing can be summed up as one person going WTF and a bunch of people agreeing with them and then another person going "my hungry ass could never be a coroner."
Me, who hasn't eaten meat in years facepalming XD
My mom did a human dissection during a nursing course. She still has a hard time eating chicken. Sometimes not being able to at all.
no this is so real. i had a bio lab where we did dissections and i went on an empty stomachā¦. the frogs thighs were like chicken meat and the fish was fish and the worms smelled like pickles. i was fighting demons in that lab oh my lord. mouth watering. i unlocked some forbidden emotions that day.
We had to dissect sheep hearts in biology class and despite intellectually knowing that I really shouldnāt, the urge to eat it was overpowering.
Mr. Jacquel, is this you??
Wonder if if i'd put "it's OK for the coroner/mortician to take a bite out of me if they want to", would it let them keep their job if they gave in to temptation?
What The Fuck
So the scene in Jason Goes To Hell where the coroner eats Jason's heart is actually firmly based in reality, got it.
i had an advanced anatomy and physical in university and had a cadaver lab.
i was also eating a lot of beef jerky at the time.
preserved human tissue looks a lot like jerky.
my eyes saw jerky a lot and my tummy was hungry.
i did not feel comfortable with those feelings.
I've heard it's inhaling actually the formaldehyde that provokes the hunger response. In my limited experience with fresh dissections and not getting hungry I think that's the case.
In my middle school there was a kid who drank some of the ājuiceā from a fetal pig jar on a dare. Possibly the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed
You're all freaks :)
my hungry ass could never be a surgeon
There's a particular preservative that bio labs use, the smell of which induces hunger. Can't for the life of me remember which one, though
The people who's careers revolve around examining dead bodies are weirdos. Who would've guessed.
Idk why but this reminds me of that post from Valentine's Day 2024 when that guy cooked 2 lobsters for his partner and himself but his lobster was rotting because it wasn't boiled alive because lobsters rot really stupid fast
One time my class was dissecting pig hearts and one of my friends just stashed one away in his blazer pocket to take home
The smell of formaldehyde is known to induce appetite. It was used as an early treatment for anorexia, but was discontinued for obvious reason. But there is nothing more unsettling than wanting to go for snacks after gross anatomy lab
I get it, but someone needs to make sure that kid has food at home.
I used to get FAMISHED while reading true crime cannibalism murder books... Being less financially stable at the time, I'd make oatmeal to curb that and it always reminded me of brains. š
Mmmm worm That's their response to would you love me if I was a worm
I remember trying to eat some meat off a dead baby pig that was being dissected. It was bad and hard to bite/chew so I didn't eat it.
And like I only bit and tasted it, not fully put it in my mouth... luckily
as someone who works in a lab and has to dissect animals at least three times a week, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT y'all look at raw meat from random animals and want to EAT IT?
Carnivores should not be allowed near bodies if this is true. Jesus Christ.
Gotta say, I've dissected a lot of things (mostly fish) and I've never felt a desire to eat it.
The smell of formaldehyde pretty much kills any appetite I have