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Since 2021, the Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria of Sassari, Italy, has been authorized to preserve and utilize post-mortem tissues and bodies for research, study, and training. Before this date, no body dissection was performed. Medical students who wanted the opportunity were given the chance to go abroad for dissection courses. The primary purpose of the present study was to assess retrospectively, and using a questionnaire, the attitudes of medical students at the University of Sassari who had travelled to the University of Bordeaux to undertake anatomical body examinations. Students were invited to complete a survey, a 14-item questionnaire was developed. Over 85% of the students were very satisfied with the dissection course, the majority of medical students find the experience of dissection to be a unique and exciting opportunity, despite it being stressful and negative for some. Despite the wide range of electronic learning resources available today, unexpectedly with respect to our original hypothesis, the majority of our students have indicated that traditional dissection methods cannot be replaced by modern tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital natives are growing up in a new media ecosystem, where the use of the net and social media is a daily practice. Even if there is a growing interest in the use of social media in university education, there is a paucity of outcome based, empirical studies assessing the impact of social media in medical education, in particular in the Human anatomy field. To facilitate human anatomy learning and teacher-student relation, a Sapienza university of Rome human anatomy teacher (HAT) created a professional Facebook profile (HATPFP) and a You Tube channel dedicated to human anatomy topics (HATYTC). In order to assess the usefulness of social media not only in human anatomy learning but also to get in touch with the human anatomy teacher, at the end of each course a survey was created than distributed to the students of health professions and medicine and surgery degree courses. Our data, the first referring to the Italian context, show a useful and positive opinion by most students on the use of social media Facebook and You Tube in the teaching of Human Anatomy. Although within the limits of an exploratory study, we have highlighted how social media can be an effective support for anatomy teaching by facilitating social interactions (in terms of time reduction, simplification, immediacy, less formality), improving learning (in terms of memorization and understanding of concepts: and notions of anatomy), and making students autonomous in their search for new knowledge of anatomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]