Women Working Among Cadavers Say Job Offers Them Lessons in Life

RIYADH — Umm Ibrahim described the feel of a dead body.

“It feels like cold, moist, heavy fabric,” she said. “The color is faint and the tissue firm. Many of the features that we recognize as ‘human’ are lost, although the contours and the scaffolding remain.”

The 51-year-old Saudi woman first saw a dead body when she helped wash her mother after she passed away many years ago. Today Umm Faisal has 17 years of experience working with the dead; she is one of four women who work in the morgue of a girl’s medical college in Riyadh.

“Working in an anatomy lab doesn’t suit everyone,” she said. “You need to have a high level of concentration besides being a fast learner in order to respond to the doctor’s gestures. Also you must be familiar with English medical terms.”

Umm Faisal works with bodies the way the rest of us might set the dinner table. Every day she is responsible for preparing bodies for dissection, which includes the macabre duty of removing any mold that has developed on portions of the corpse that isn’t sufficiently covered with formalin, the particularly nasty liquid used in science to preserve organic bodies that would otherwise decay.

The bodies are, of course, from people who were non-Muslims, and are purchased from authorized suppliers in Australia, France, Canada and Malaysia. A typical corpse costs about 4,000 euros. Umm Ibrahim pointed that usually the bodies are valid for six to eight years. “One of the bodies lasted 15 years,” she said

The women who work in this lab say they sometimes face strange reactions from people.

Dalal, 39, one of the other women working in the morgue, says that people are averse to shaking her hand. Dalal has been working in the lab for three years now.

“I have been always dreaming to become a doctor, and this job brings me closer to the field,” she said.

Dalal, who has higher career aspirations and is planning to take English classes, said that men oversee the dissection of the bodies, but that in the future women in the lab may also be permitted to perform tasks with more responsibility.

“We have already undergone theoretical and applied courses in taxidermy and dissection,” she said.

Umm Faisal says that this type of work has its hazards. “Most workers in this profession obtain adequate compensation for the damages that they endure working with an extremely noxious chemical like formalin. My health used to be fine. Now I suffer from asthma.”

But at the same time Umm Ibrahim says she believes her job has a humanitarian element. “The lab offers lessons about human’s fate and this pushes people to be better,” she said. “Almost all students that endure a course or two in this lab emerge with a different and better attitude about life.”

Although the bodies are of people who were not Muslims (it is forbidden to use bodies of Muslims as scientific cadavers), Umm Faisal says she does what she can to treat the corpses with the respect as instructed by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).

“I follow the Prophet’s instructions regarding the treatment of dead bodies,” she said.

And does Umm Faisal face any additional stigma for being a woman in the profession. She says “no”, and that she wouldn’t care anyway.

“My family and children are proud of me,” she said, though quietly admitting that she doesn’t volunteer to people information about her career.

Dalal said that working in the lab has been interesting to say the least. “A few days after I started here, I moved a body from the formalin pool. There was air inside the lungs and when we moved the corpse it sounded like it was snoring, which caused everyone in the lab to have a temporary case of the heebie-jeebies.”