The pandemic has caused a shortage of cadavers

PRESS A KNIFE into human flesh and, as the blade slides in, the sensation subtly changes. Human skin, says Claire Smith, professor of anatomy at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, “feels like chicken skin”; it is “slightly rougher” and “not always slippery”. Slice into a human artery, meanwhile, and you will feel “a little bit of springback”; while veins just feel “flat” and nerves, says Dr Smith, “feel like a noodle”.

This complex stew of sensations that travels from blade to brain is known in the trade as “haptic feedback” and, in surgery, it matters. It has also, this year, been hard for trainee medics to come by. Because the covid-19 pandemic has caused—and the irony of this hardly needs to be laboured—a shortage in cadavers.