In what has got tongues wagging across the nation, a 26-year-old Medical student, Enya Egbe has narrated how he fled his anatomy class crying after being troubled by the corpse he was asked to work on.
Reports had it that on that day, Egbe vividly recalled how seven years ago at Nigeria’s University of Calabar, converged with fellow students around three tables with a cadaver laid out on each.
Minutes later, a troubled Egbe screamed and ran. That was because the body his group had been about to dissect was that of Divine, his friend of more than seven years.
In a chat with newsmen, Egbe said “We used to go clubbing together. There were two bullet holes on the right side of his chest.”
It was gathered that Oyifo Ana was one of the many students who ran out after Egbe and found him weeping outside.
Speaking with newsmen, Ana said “Most of the cadavers we used in school had bullets in them. I felt so bad when I realised that some of the people may not be real criminals”. Ana noted that early one morning she had seen a police van loaded with bloodied bodies at their medical school, which had a mortuary attached to it.
Reports said afterward, Egbe sent a message to Divine’s family who, it turned out, had been going to different police stations in search of their relative after he and three friends were arrested by security agents on their way back from a night out. The family eventually managed to reclaim his body, reports said.
It was gathered that Divine’s family managed to get some of the officers involved in his killing sacked – scant justice but still more than that experienced by many other Nigerians whose loved ones were the victims of police violence and may also have ended up in medical schools around the country.
On his part, Egbe was so traumatised by seeing his friend’s body that he abandoned his studies for weeks, imagining Divine standing by the door each time he tried to enter the anatomy room.
He ended up graduating a year after his classmates, and now works in a hospital lab in Delta state.
It should be noted that in Nigeria, a current law hands “unclaimed bodies” in government mortuaries to medical schools. The state can also appropriate bodies of executed criminals, though the last execution took place in 2007.
According to a 2011 research in the medical journal Clinical Anatomy, more than 90% of the cadavers used in Nigerian medical schools are “criminals killed by shooting”.
Analysts are of the view that in reality, this means they were suspects shot dead by security forces. Their estimated ages are between 20 and 40 years, 95% are male, and three out of four are from the lower socio-economic class. There are zero body donations.
Harping on the research, Emeka Anyanwu, a professor of anatomy at the University of Nigeria, who co-authored the study ‘Ambulance duty,’ said “Nothing has changed 10 years later”.
According to reports, Nigeria’s association of anatomists is now lobbying for a change in the law that will ensure mortuaries obtain full historical records of bodies donated to schools, and also family consent. It will also set out ways to encourage people to donate their bodies to medical science.
The association’s head, Olugbenga Ayannuga, said “There will be a lot of education and a lot of advocacy so people can see that if I donate my body, it will be for the good of the society”.
