Scientists and physicians say it will add to the storehouse of human knowledge and improve our ability to tackle disease. Conservatives and ethicists argue that it violates the sanctity of the human body.

Like the stem cell controversy, dissection raised questions about where the body and soul begin and end. The ethical firestorm got under way as far back as the fourth century BC - the era of Aristotle and Hippocrates.

The prevailing religious attitudes of the period considered the body and soul to be separate entities, making dissection acceptable. But during the time of the Romans, the practice was banned. For the next 1,000 years, scientists were reduced to dissecting animals. The famous Greek anatomist Galen, whose work in the second century was the basis for all anatomical assumptions for nearly 1,400 years, relied almost entirely on pigs and monkeys for scientific research.

By the Renaissance, attitudes had begun to shift again. In the late 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci secretly made use of human cadavers for his anatomical drawings, detailing the human skeletal, muscular, and vascular systems as never before. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius, considered to be the father of modern anatomy, published his anatomical treatise De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a series of detailed woodcuts of dissected corpses. In 1769  the Italian physician Giovanni Batista Morgagni published another important book 'The seats and causes of diseases investigated by anatomy.

The first anatomists had to unburry corpses at night but it did not improve with the legalization of dissection as there was very few volunteers to give away their body to science. Most people feared that mutilation of the corpse might have eschatological implications. War victims and executed criminals from the gallows, brought their flesh to the relentless scalpels of doctors across the XVI and XVIIth centuries. There was also a black market and possibly many crimes were commited to bring fresh bodies to anatomy schools for as much as £10 .

By the mid-1830s, many US states and the UK had passed the Anatomy Act. The act ended the practice of ushering criminal corpses - replacing them with the bodies of people too poor to afford a proper burial. Unfortunately, this did little to stop the grave robbing, and incited the poor to protest.

Over time, as consent became necessary for dissection, the public gradually lost some of its disdain for the practice. Attitudes toward death also shifted. With so many soldiers failing to return home from World War I, society learned to separate the whereabouts of a dead body from a soul's fate in the afterlife. Slowly, med schools began to receive a steady supply of legitimately donated corpses.

Today, dissecting cadavers is a critical component of every medical education. "Without the anatomical understanding of the human body that is afforded by dissection," says Joel Howell, a professor of history and internal medicine at the University of Michigan, "much of modern medicine would simply not exist."