In a nondescript office building near the Charlotte airport last month, adults clad in blue gowns crowded around the body of a woman who had died of cardiovascular disease. An instructor gently pressed her gloved finger against the woman’s lung and invited the others to do the same.

“If you’ve never felt a lung, you need to feel a lung,” she said. “Most people think lungs are like a balloon, but they are more like a kitchen sponge. They have millions of tiny air sacs.”

Later, the class felt the stones in the woman’s gallbladder and took turns holding her heart in their hands.

“Wow, that’s amazing,” one woman whispered when she was handed the heart. Another person compared the organ’s texture to the velvety skin of a stingray.

None of the people in the lab were doctors or medical students. They were participants in the Dissection Club at Experience Anatomy, a private cadaver lab that offers nurses, yoga teachers, massage therapists and others deeply interested in anatomy an opportunity to dissect the human body.

In the past, cadaver dissections were mostly reserved for doctors and medical students. But Jamie Decker, founder and CEO of Experience Anatomy, believes the experience should be accessible to everyone — especially students and professionals who work on living people’s bodies.

“I’ve seen so many people have an ‘aha’ moment in the cadaver lab, young and old alike. Why not allow more people to have that experience?” Decker said…

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