The dissection hall of the new prosection facility was conceived and built on the basis of new research findings from a study conducted by the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance. Concretely, this means that newly gained insights into exposure to formaldehyde fumes in the context of preparatory work in anatomy and medicine were incorporated into the implementation of a state-of-the-art ventilation system, which enables year-round (dissection) work on formaldehyde-fixed body donors.

Until now, work on body donors at the Faculty of Medicine had to be restricted to the winter months, since the sometimes significantly higher summer temperatures in the dissection hall would have led to considerably increased formaldehyde exposure for students, teaching staff, and researchers (formaldehyde evaporates much more strongly from tissue at higher temperatures than in the cold). Instruction of students in the new prosection facility will begin in the summer semester of 2026.

Further information about the construction project

Each semester, around 230 students from human medicine, dentistry, and neuroscience enroll in the courses of Macroscopic Anatomy (dissection course) and Microscopic Anatomy (histology course). In addition, up to 10 clinical continuing education courses take place each year. These include courses in orthopedics and trauma surgery, ENT and dental medicine, as well as pediatric surgery, neurosurgery, and several others.

All teaching rooms in the new building, including the new dissection hall, are fully air-conditioned, ensuring that regular, year-round semester-based anatomy teaching will be possible in the future. This particularly includes holding the dissection course also in the summer semester, which was previously not feasible due to the already described “formaldehyde issue.” The air conditioning, along with the state-of-the-art, high-performance ventilation technology in the dissection hall, enables both students and lecturers to work with formaldehyde-fixed anatomical specimens even at high outside temperatures, without risking health impairments from formaldehyde exposure.

This leads to an improvement in teaching through better curriculum planning: until now, the dissection course was held for two semester cohorts in the winter semester, and the histology course for two semester cohorts in the summer semester. In the future, year-round rotation will be possible.

Clinical-anatomical research is possible in the new prosection facility under optimal safety conditions. Thanks to the extensive equipment for the storage of unfixed body donors (using state-of-the-art cooling and freezing units), work can be carried out on both unfixed and formaldehyde-fixed bodies.

The equipment for biomechanical research will be housed in a separate workspace.

The new prosection facility includes, among other things, a new storage room in which purchased plastinates and collection objects already owned by the Department of Anatomy of the Faculty of Medicine can be kept. Plastinates are anatomical specimens preserved through plastination for long-term conservation, primarily used for teaching purposes.

In addition, a plastination room with a plastination unit is being set up, which will enable the Department of Anatomy to produce its own plastinates from the approximately 90 body donations received each year. These will then be used, among other things, for teaching and examination purposes.

The Department of Anatomy in Cologne owns many collection objects, some of them highly valuable, which have been produced over the past decades using a variety of techniques. A large portion of the specimens dates from the 1960s to the 1980s and was created with meticulous precision by Günter Hancke, a preparator who worked at the Cologne Department of Anatomy from 1962 to 1990.

In addition to human wet and dry specimens, the collection includes valuable animal preparations, among them true rarities such as a tuatara specimen and an echidna. An exhibition room allows for the proper presentation of these collection objects and will also be made accessible to an interested public upon request.

• Technical rooms and offices of the prosection facility
• 2 dissection halls
• Histology hall
• Anatomy – 2 seminar rooms
• Anatomy – 3 dissection rooms for small-group teaching/research
• Trauma surgery and other clinical working groups – wet study room
• Experimental medicine – offices
• Pathology – storage room

Project page Prosection medfacilities