2023-06-02 20:30:00
A solemn gathering was held at Columbia University last month with the elements of a traditional funeral. Students and teachers played music and gave speeches. The university chaplain closed the ceremony with a reflection.
But there was a fundamental difference: No one in the room knew the people whose lives they were honoring. All in attendance were students and faculty at Columbia Medical School, and they had gathered to show their gratitude to the people who had donated their bodies for students to study in the anatomy lab.
“Who were they?” asked Bree Zhang, a first-year dental student. “A father, a son, a co-worker, a friend? What books had they read? How is your family now, and will you know how much your loved one has given to me and the rest of us?
Similar scenes played out across the United States this spring as medical, dental and physical therapy students gathered to pay tribute to whole-body donors and their families. At ceremonies, students play music, light candles, read letters, and share artwork. (A diagram of the heart from Zhang’s anatomy studies, superimposed on whimsical book drawings of her, tree roots and human figures, was projected behind her as she delivered a speech at Columbia.) Often, there is a non-denominational spiritual leader who participates in the ceremony. Sometimes the ceremony includes the naming of a tree or offering flowers to a donor’s family.
It is not clear how many people in the United States donate their bodies for medical and educational research, although estimates suggest that regarding 20,000 people or their families do so each year. Criteria vary by program and state; In general, anyone over the age of 18 can be a donor, although people with certain communicable diseases, such as hepatitis B or C, tuberculosis and HIV or AIDS, are usually excluded. Many programs also exclude cadavers that have been autopsied or had organs removed for donation.
Even with the introduction of elaborate 3D viewing programs, dissection remains the cornerstone of most first-year medical training, as it has for centuries. Students spend months methodically studying the structures of the body, including organs, tendons, veins, and tissues. Experience teaches more than just the basics of medicine. Treating the donor, considered a doctor’s first patient, with respect and care provides students with a foundation of ethics and professionalism, said Joy Balta, chair of the American Anatomy Association’s human body donation committee.
acknowledge a sacrifice
The donation of bodies is a selfless act on the part of both the donors and their families, who can wait up to a couple of years to receive the ashes. Commemorative acts, often called thanksgiving or gratitude ceremonies, recognize the sacrifice.
“You can think regarding the donor you’ve been working with,” said Balta, who is also director of the Anatomy Learning Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “These are people,” he added, “who donated their body, who wanted you to work with them to improve science and medical care.”
Columbia’s Vagelos University for Physicians and Surgeons began holding a donor appreciation ceremony in the late 1970s as a way to mark an experience that “is very difficult for some students and very transformative,” said Paulette Bernd, who runs the school’s clinical gross anatomy course.
In some centers the relatives of the donors are invited. In others, the ceremonies are for students and faculty only, an extension of the anonymity provided to donors in the lab. For example, at Brown University, students are only told the donor’s age, cause of death, marital status, and occupation, and cover the donor’s hands and face for a long time. part of the process.
“The bodies go through this whole anonymization process,” explained Nidhi Bhaskar, a first-year medical student who helped coordinate a thank-you ceremony at Brown this month. “And this is a great way to rehumanize them. We take into account the very palpable gift that the relatives who are still processing their loss have already left”.
The anatomy lab can be a stressful experience for medical students, who “may be dealing with death and agony for the first time,” said Daniel Topping, an associate clinical professor in the department of anatomy and cell biology at University of Florida College of Medicine.
‘I knew she was helping someone.’
Among the guests at the University of Washington ceremony was Regina Dunn. When her mother, Louise Dunn, passed away in July at age 90, she was too distraught to organize a funeral. The donor memorial service was Louise Dunn’s first funeral, she said.
“They made you feel very comfortable,” Regina Dunn said of the students. “And a lot of people wanted that closure.”
Louise Dunn, who opened a modeling school for women of color in St. Louis in 1960, was driven throughout her life by a desire to help people, her daughter said. So it’s not surprising that she wanted to continue helping others following her death, she Dunn said, even though some of her survivors had to overcome some apprehension at her decision to donate her body to the science.
Regina Dunn recounted how a black student told a friend who accompanied her to the ceremony that having a black donor in the lab, when most donors are white, had a profound impact.
“I was honored, really,” Dunn said, “because I knew that this woman was helping someone.”
For the family of Michael Haas, who donated his body to the Indiana University School of Medicine, a thank-you ceremony last month was a closure in many ways.
It was held on April 16, four days before Haas’s death anniversary, according to his wife, Molly Haas. The ceremony was held on the college campus in Bloomington, Indiana, where the couple became engaged in 1970. Families received white and red carnations; Molly Haas remembered that her husband always bought her red carnations.
They both decided to donate their bodies in 2012, around the time Michael Haas’s Alzheimer’s symptoms began to manifest. For Haas, a former social worker and Episcopalian priest, becoming a whole-body donor was a way to extend a lifelong mission of service, his wife explained.
“Her values and ethics were always very generous,” said Molly Haas.
‘A great feeling of gratitude’
Appreciation ceremonies are often planned by students, but they also give professors who run anatomy labs a way to process their relationships with the people who donate their bodies to medical education.
“I feel great gratitude, responsibility and honor every time I’m around a donor,” said Topping, of the University of Florida. “For me it is something very sacred.”
Nirusha Lachman, head of the department of clinical anatomy at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Sciences, attended her first appreciation ceremony some 40 years ago while studying in South Africa, and has given speeches at various ceremonies since.
According to her, these meetings serve to remember that the donors are still alive thanks to the education that their bodies have provided.
“We want this idea to resonate, including among families,” Lachman said, “so that they know that death was not the end of their loved ones.”
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