The samples he has that day have been taken from Liverpool Hospital's much larger collection of parts held in a room several floors away. But he is adamant that collections of body parts held by hospitals and universities are vital to the continued practice of medicine and the development of new and better treatments for diseases. And the rapid decline in the number of people prepared to allow the dead bodies of their children or parents or partners to be investigated in an autopsy and possibly to have parts of those kept by the pathologists for later study is jeopardising the future of research, Professor Davies says. Take the retained brain with its tumour, before us on the table. We haven't the faintest idea about why primary malignancies arise in the brain.
Brain tumours are a complete enigma at the moment.
The difference between human and animal brain disease means that research on animals does not help find the answer. The only way to find that out is to go the brain tissue itself, he says. These minute differences these images show can only be deciphered with reference to real brain tissue - the tissue kept in collections like those this sample comes from. Traditional methods are used to validate new ones. The other important role of a hospital autopsy is in quality control, Professor Davies says.