It looks like a holiday village but it is a room in which an autopsy is being performed.
The viral video that shows doctors singing and dancing to the timeless hit "Gioca Jouer" by Claudio Cecchetto in front of a freshly dissected body , whose feet are sticking out from under the sheet, at a course that took place in Malta is causing discussion. Professors from well-known Italian universities can be recognized from the images.
«It was the preparatory work for a session of the national conference entitled "live autopsy" and for which I am responsible - admits Prof. Cristoforo Pomara, professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Catania - the video, illegally distributed, was made during a break during an anatomical exercise abroad on bodies donated for study and training purposes and therefore absolutely detached from the medical-legal professional context ".
It was "neither a judicial autopsy nor a diagnostic test - the defense -. We worked for a week on very difficult dissection techniques, even more than 12 hours a day, from morning to late at night in the dissection room." These efforts "cannot be mortified - observes Pomara - by a few seconds of a video that captures a relaxing moment", "necessary to ease the tension" from "very delicate training activities". The video «was made during a necessary break». So the apology "not so much for what happened, but for the fact that it was illegally disseminated and fed to social media". And he concludes: "There has never been a desire on the part of any of us to lack respect."
«An unbecoming attitude», thundered the president of the National Federation of medical orders, surgeons and dentists (Fnomceo), Filippo Anelli. In Italy "it has never happened that decorum in the exercise of a professional training activity has so clearly failed." And he hypothesizes «disciplinary measures against the doctors who participated», the provincial orders to which the doctors are registered will be the ones to evaluate.
Even the Italian Society of Forensic Medicine and Insurance (Simla) distances itself : «The behavior captured in the video is reprehensible and foreign to medical-legal culture» says Professor Francesco Introna, president of the society, claiming that autopsies have «always been characterized by the utmost respect for the dignity of the corpse and of the relatives". Introna also specifies that the course of the video was not organized nor sponsored by Simla but was "a teaching exercise carried out abroad and not a judicial autopsy".
(Unioneonline/D)
