SQUEAMISH readers, be warned: you should skip straight to the crossword now. Neither should children read on. I am about to relate the story of a 'prank' undertaken by a medical school student, and it is not for the young, the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.

The main protagonist is a man who went on to become a leading psychiatrist at one of Britain's top-security hospitals. Some years ago he told me how, in his student days, he and a friend would borrow a pickled manhood stored in a jar at the teaching hospital where they were based.

They would then proceed to a gents' public toilet in the centre of town. One positioned himself in front of the urinal, holding the organ as if it were his own. The other hid in a cubicle to watch the proceedings.

By and by, someone else would enter the toilet and use the urinal next to our student doctor. At which point, he would start an elaborate pantomime, cursing his inability to "go". Eventually he would pretend to rip off the offending protuberance, throw it into the porcelain bowl and storm off.

Naturally this would scare the willies out of the stranger, who would flee and no doubt seek counselling from the sort of psychiatrist my storyteller eventually became.

This is at once a funny and unpleasant story. For me, it confirmed a belief that psychiatrists are generally as mad as their patients. And it suggested that doctors can have a chilling detachment from human remains.

That detachment, unchecked, is what eventually led to the Alder Hey scandal. One pathologist at the Liverpool hospital, Prof Dick van Velzen, systematically ordered the "unethical and illegal" stripping of every organ from every child who had had a post-mortem between 1988 and 1995, Health Secretary Alan Milburn told a horrified country yesterday. This man systematically defied the parents and defiled their dead children's bodies with sickening disdain.

Meanwhile, we learn that 104,000 organs are in storage in hospitals up and down the country. This in itself is not shocking. Doctors can only learn how to improve our lives by studying our deaths. What we leave behind holds the key to overcoming the diseases that plague those who remain.

But it is the attitude that shocks. The fact that so many doctors felt they had a right to help themselves to livers, lungs, brains, with only a cursory and mealy-mouthed request for permission from grieving relatives.

Doctors are bound to develop a detachment from the human flesh that is their work. They could not do the job otherwise. However, a medical student who manipulates human organs for his own amusement, or a medical profession that talks in terms of "harvesting" human organs, is not detached, but dehumanised.

Doctors learn many things in their years of training. Hubris is not one of them. That was underlined by doctors' leaders yesterday, who responded to the hideous revelations by warning us not to "demonise" them.

They still cannot see that the problem is not the public demonising doctors, but deifying them. For too long society has worshipped them as all-powerful beings whose authority cannot be questioned. Doctors are trained to feel superior. A few even begin to believe they are gods whose actions are above the law, most infamously mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, and now, it seems, Prof van Velzen.

To try to forestall public outrage, Alan Milburn has promised to change the law so parents will never again unknowingly grant doctors consent to plunder their child's body.

More than that, we need a major change in doctors' attitudes. Our medical schools should begin by teaching students that human remains are more than just bits and bobs laid on to satisfy their clinical curiosity.