The image of a naked blonde has haunted me for the last few weeks. She appeared on my television one night last month, courtesy of Channel 4, with only a mask over her face to protect her modesty.

Next to her, Professor Gunther von Hagens cheerfully announced his intention to explore her digestive system, removing the back of her skull and wiggling his fingers into her mouth. As I struggled to come to terms with the sickly greyness of her skin, my science graduate housemates discussed whether breasts shrink when you die.

Maybe it was the suspicion that the flatness of her chest was probably a subject she would not have been keen to discuss when she was alive, but something about the whole experience that made me uncomfortable.

At first, I thought it was just squeamishness. I was, after all, the only kid in my class that was more upset by the idea of slicing open a bull's eye than the bull was. But, as the programme continued, I found that close up shots of intestines and cross-sections of the spine did not bother me. I discovered that what got to me was not the quintessential 'ickiness' of human insides but the fact that it was clearly a person hanging there.

The clay face mask, intended to disguise her identity, did little to dispel this sense of humanity. Her personality, what made her herself, may have been long gone. However, up there on screen, it was still someone that, a few weeks earlier, might have been capable of laughing at bad jokes. Somewhere out there, there were people whose husband or mother or friend was being taken to bits.

Why do I care? Why does it matter? Her loved ones were presumably pretty unlikely to be watching Channel 4 at that precise moment. Even if they were, she was sufficiently disguised. But it still felt somehow disrespectful: not to cut her open, but to intersperse the experience with adverts – to package it, profit from it, use her guts for entertainment.

Dissections like this have to happen for the advancement of medicine. When I die, I want my organs harvested for whoever needs them, even if my next of kin finds the idea distasteful –
having said that, I am not sure how much use half of them will be. My eyes are pretty good; if anyone wants to get first dibs, drop me a line.

Those doing the cutting have to dehumanise the corpse in front of them, or they would go mad. I do not find stories of medical students cheerfully leaving notes, or other surprises, for each other in shared cadavers distasteful in quite the same way. That is education: this was a vehicle for selling advertising space.

At an ak13 editorial meeting some time ago, conversation turned to the fate of the dead – we are a macabre lot. One of the more religious of our number asked why the fate of the body mattered to those with no faith. What meaning can the last rites have if death is the end, and you are not there to appreciate them?

After some debate, we concluded that it was because if your body really were all that is left, you would want it treated nicely. If this lump of undercooked meat is all there is to me, I would prefer it not to end its existence being left to rot somewhere and scare children. And I would rather Channel 4 did not use my final dissection as a ratings grabber.