Experience Anatomy

The story

You usually need a medical degree, a white coat, and four years of medical school tuition to get your hands on real human organs. Experience Anatomy quietly broke that monopoly. Tucked away in a West Charlotte industrial flex space near the airport, founder Jamie Decker built a private cadaver lab and anatomical education center that grants regular citizens access to real human tissue.

Instead of relying strictly on plastic models or digitized screens, the facility houses an extensive collection of plastinated human specimens—the same dry, odorless preservation technique popularized by Body Worlds that replaces fluids with cured silicone. For deeper dissection studies, the lab uses a soft-embalming method on donor tissue that preserves natural organ colors and tissue pliability without choking the room in the eye-watering formaldehyde stench typical of traditional gross anatomy labs.

Through public workshops and their Dissection Club, the lab invites bodyworkers, athletic trainers, and curious civilians to suit up in lab gowns. Under the guidance of professional anatomists, participants examine real vascular networks, touch preserved human lungs, and hold actual human hearts—a rare, deeply visceral look inside our shared internal biology that you won't find on any standard city tour.