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Hi all, I read this in the Chicago Tribune. I was wondering what people thought about it and what they do in their schools.
'Our silent teachers'
Medical students pay their respects to the men and women who donated their bodies to education
By Kevin McKeough
Special to the Tribune
May 9, 2003
`You did not know me, my first, my best teacher. . . . You will not even know the runny-nosed 8-year-old who comes in with an earache. My eyes will peer through light, while the imprint of your ear, that first ear to teach me, will still remain etched in my brain.'
Dipti Barot remembers that the man she calls "my first, best teacher" had a tattoo on his right arm, and a large aneurysm in a blood vessel near his heart that probably contributed to his death at age 75.
A month after she last saw him -- which is to say, a month after she last examined his dissected remains -- Barot and about 70 other University of Illinois at Chicago medical students gathered to pay tribute to the men and women who had donated their bodies to the university's gross anatomy laboratory.
"These 32 men and women were our silent teachers," says Norman Lieska, PhD, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology who supervises UIC's medical gross anatomy course, to the sea of students in white lab coats who fill the angled seats of a lecture hall. "Layer by layer, region by region, they've revealed the secrets of the human body to us."
"They've also afforded us the opportunity to look over the abyss, to face our own mortality. In many ways, that's the greater lesson."
The 56-year-old Lieska -- whose tall, slender build, black double-breasted suit and deeply creased face make him seem typecast for this role -- has presided over this annual ceremony ever since a student suggested it a few years ago .
This show of respect is a major change from the days when medical students had to rob graves to obtain bodies for their education, a practice that continued into the early 20th Century.
Now UIC receives the cadavers of men and women who bequeath their bodies to science via the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois, and memorial services for them have become a rite of passage for first-year medical students. Many medical schools across the country now hold similar observances.
The ceremony also marks a shift in attitudes in the last decade from the gallows humor and practical jokes that once were a common part of gross anatomy studies. "It was a necessary thing for me to feel closure for the process," 23-year-old Kildeer native Tom Dekoj explains after the UIC ceremony. "A person has given a gift, and their families have given a gift, that is invaluable."
"It's the least we can do to show our respect," adds Amit Bakshi, a 21-year-old from Darien. "It's a way to express our gratitude for the ultimate contribution," concurs his dissecting partner, Cindy Chan, a 23-year-old Deerfield native.
Medical schools are encouraging this more reverent regard for donors in their efforts to nurture sensitivity toward patients in their students, who paradoxically often find their humane impulses drilled out of them by the clinical aspects of their training.
Patients are people
"[Medical schools] were trying to get doctors to separate from their feelings. To me, that the absolutely wrong thing to do for people who are working with people in need," says the Rev. Dr. Kyle Nash, a thanatologist (expert in death issues) who works with U. of C. students.
"Physicians have the greatest probability of acting from a place of care and compassion toward their patients if they have been treated with care and compassion themselves, throughout their medical educations," Nash says.
After the ceremony, Lieska reflects: "Even though they're just dealing at this point with corporal remains of the dead, that can be translated into caring for living people. Just because a person is dead doesn't mean that there isn't respect for that body. . . . Students come in with inherent respect and empathy. I think one of our major goals is to not educate that out of them."
Although they're the ones being honored, the cadavers themselves are not present in the room during this lunch hour ceremony on the last day of April. They lie in a lab several floors upstairs in the UIC College of Medicine building on the city's Near West Side. In their place, a lone steel dissecting table has been set at the front of the lecture hall, its long hood open to a silvery tray that rests on legs with wheels.
Soon the heavily embalmed cadavers will be cremated, and the ashes will be returned to the donors' families. Yet as Lieska notes, they have achieved a kind of immortality. "They will become part of your treatment plans, your way of healing," he tells the students.
Major surgery
By now, much of each donor's skin has been peeled away, layers of tissue have been filleted, and many of the organs have been carved from the body. This sort of cadaver dissection has been a standard part of the study of human anatomy since the research of a 16th Century Flemish surgeon named Andreas Vesalius laid the foundation for the field.
However commonplace it may be in the medical world, though, the experience clearly has had a profound impact on these medical students in their early 20s, many of whom have never seen a corpse, let alone contemplated their own mortality.
"It's pretty freaky," says Barot, a 25-year-old Southern Californian.
"These were people and here we are digging up their heart."
"The first time it was really hard to put the first cut in," Chan says. "You feel guilty that you're able to so casually do that, but it was the final wish of the donors that you'd be able to do that."
Likewise, Dekoj says he found it troubling "when I became totally comfortable with dissecting a human being. You feel inhuman. It's something your mind goes through to protect you."
To help the students work through these emotions, this year the university offered a writing workshop in conjunction with the gross anatomy course.
Students met about once a month with Lieska and Suzanne Poirier, a professor of literature and medical education, who suggested exercises to help them express their feelings about the experience.
"Having these sorts of activities is really a mechanism for the students to express what they're coming to medical school with. The idealism, the humanism, the altruism does drives many people," Lieska says.
The results of the workshop find their way into the remarks of some of the students who speak during the ceremony.
Dekoj reads a poem that reflects on the hands that "once stroked the forehead and scratched the brow" . . . and now "won't touch your face again."
"But with me you stay," he concludes, "your hand guides mine."
Barot's poem contemplates the line from donor to medical student to patient:
"You did not know me, my first, my best teacher. . . . You will not even know the runny-nosed 8-year-old who comes in with an earache. My eyes will peer through light, while the imprint of your ear, that first ear to teach me, will still remain etched in my brain."
On a lighter note, 23-year-old Chicagoan Olusola Olowe pays tribute to a donor with hip-hop rhymes:
"That metastatic cancer caused your cells to go corrupt.
I'm guessing your tissue function was cool until that condition messed it up.
And instead of lying in a casket three times two feet under the dirt stuck.
You realized the value of your body and just gave it up."
Solemn ceremony
After the readings, Lieska dims the lights. Like mourners paying their last respects at a casket, one representative from each dissecting team descends the auditorium stairs and lays a note of thanks on the dissecting table that will be given to the donor's family.
Then each student lights a candle from the one Lieska holds, and sets it on the table where a body's head would lie. When the last student is done, Lieska asks for a few minutes of silence: The warm candlelight gleams against the cold steel as the students bow their heads in contemplation and prayer.
When the lights come back on and Lieska announces the ceremony's end, the students quickly file out of the hall. Final exams are the following week (although the gross anatomy final was given before spring break in March), and they have intensive studying to do.
Still, the students are grateful to have been given an opportunity to trade contemplation for memorization.
"It had a proper degree of solemnity," Dekoj says. "It was an appropriate thing for us to deal with it. It was a nice way to close it up."
"It's good for us," Barot says. "We're young, we think we're immortal, and because we're med students we're super-ego-maniacal. It pulls you to a place of humility, which is something that doctors need more than any segment of the population. You can't help but be humbled by death."
'Our silent teachers'
Medical students pay their respects to the men and women who donated their bodies to education
By Kevin McKeough
Special to the Tribune
May 9, 2003
`You did not know me, my first, my best teacher. . . . You will not even know the runny-nosed 8-year-old who comes in with an earache. My eyes will peer through light, while the imprint of your ear, that first ear to teach me, will still remain etched in my brain.'
Dipti Barot remembers that the man she calls "my first, best teacher" had a tattoo on his right arm, and a large aneurysm in a blood vessel near his heart that probably contributed to his death at age 75.
A month after she last saw him -- which is to say, a month after she last examined his dissected remains -- Barot and about 70 other University of Illinois at Chicago medical students gathered to pay tribute to the men and women who had donated their bodies to the university's gross anatomy laboratory.
"These 32 men and women were our silent teachers," says Norman Lieska, PhD, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology who supervises UIC's medical gross anatomy course, to the sea of students in white lab coats who fill the angled seats of a lecture hall. "Layer by layer, region by region, they've revealed the secrets of the human body to us."
"They've also afforded us the opportunity to look over the abyss, to face our own mortality. In many ways, that's the greater lesson."
The 56-year-old Lieska -- whose tall, slender build, black double-breasted suit and deeply creased face make him seem typecast for this role -- has presided over this annual ceremony ever since a student suggested it a few years ago .
This show of respect is a major change from the days when medical students had to rob graves to obtain bodies for their education, a practice that continued into the early 20th Century.
Now UIC receives the cadavers of men and women who bequeath their bodies to science via the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois, and memorial services for them have become a rite of passage for first-year medical students. Many medical schools across the country now hold similar observances.
The ceremony also marks a shift in attitudes in the last decade from the gallows humor and practical jokes that once were a common part of gross anatomy studies. "It was a necessary thing for me to feel closure for the process," 23-year-old Kildeer native Tom Dekoj explains after the UIC ceremony. "A person has given a gift, and their families have given a gift, that is invaluable."
"It's the least we can do to show our respect," adds Amit Bakshi, a 21-year-old from Darien. "It's a way to express our gratitude for the ultimate contribution," concurs his dissecting partner, Cindy Chan, a 23-year-old Deerfield native.
Medical schools are encouraging this more reverent regard for donors in their efforts to nurture sensitivity toward patients in their students, who paradoxically often find their humane impulses drilled out of them by the clinical aspects of their training.
Patients are people
"[Medical schools] were trying to get doctors to separate from their feelings. To me, that the absolutely wrong thing to do for people who are working with people in need," says the Rev. Dr. Kyle Nash, a thanatologist (expert in death issues) who works with U. of C. students.
"Physicians have the greatest probability of acting from a place of care and compassion toward their patients if they have been treated with care and compassion themselves, throughout their medical educations," Nash says.
After the ceremony, Lieska reflects: "Even though they're just dealing at this point with corporal remains of the dead, that can be translated into caring for living people. Just because a person is dead doesn't mean that there isn't respect for that body. . . . Students come in with inherent respect and empathy. I think one of our major goals is to not educate that out of them."
Although they're the ones being honored, the cadavers themselves are not present in the room during this lunch hour ceremony on the last day of April. They lie in a lab several floors upstairs in the UIC College of Medicine building on the city's Near West Side. In their place, a lone steel dissecting table has been set at the front of the lecture hall, its long hood open to a silvery tray that rests on legs with wheels.
Soon the heavily embalmed cadavers will be cremated, and the ashes will be returned to the donors' families. Yet as Lieska notes, they have achieved a kind of immortality. "They will become part of your treatment plans, your way of healing," he tells the students.
Major surgery
By now, much of each donor's skin has been peeled away, layers of tissue have been filleted, and many of the organs have been carved from the body. This sort of cadaver dissection has been a standard part of the study of human anatomy since the research of a 16th Century Flemish surgeon named Andreas Vesalius laid the foundation for the field.
However commonplace it may be in the medical world, though, the experience clearly has had a profound impact on these medical students in their early 20s, many of whom have never seen a corpse, let alone contemplated their own mortality.
"It's pretty freaky," says Barot, a 25-year-old Southern Californian.
"These were people and here we are digging up their heart."
"The first time it was really hard to put the first cut in," Chan says. "You feel guilty that you're able to so casually do that, but it was the final wish of the donors that you'd be able to do that."
Likewise, Dekoj says he found it troubling "when I became totally comfortable with dissecting a human being. You feel inhuman. It's something your mind goes through to protect you."
To help the students work through these emotions, this year the university offered a writing workshop in conjunction with the gross anatomy course.
Students met about once a month with Lieska and Suzanne Poirier, a professor of literature and medical education, who suggested exercises to help them express their feelings about the experience.
"Having these sorts of activities is really a mechanism for the students to express what they're coming to medical school with. The idealism, the humanism, the altruism does drives many people," Lieska says.
The results of the workshop find their way into the remarks of some of the students who speak during the ceremony.
Dekoj reads a poem that reflects on the hands that "once stroked the forehead and scratched the brow" . . . and now "won't touch your face again."
"But with me you stay," he concludes, "your hand guides mine."
Barot's poem contemplates the line from donor to medical student to patient:
"You did not know me, my first, my best teacher. . . . You will not even know the runny-nosed 8-year-old who comes in with an earache. My eyes will peer through light, while the imprint of your ear, that first ear to teach me, will still remain etched in my brain."
On a lighter note, 23-year-old Chicagoan Olusola Olowe pays tribute to a donor with hip-hop rhymes:
"That metastatic cancer caused your cells to go corrupt.
I'm guessing your tissue function was cool until that condition messed it up.
And instead of lying in a casket three times two feet under the dirt stuck.
You realized the value of your body and just gave it up."
Solemn ceremony
After the readings, Lieska dims the lights. Like mourners paying their last respects at a casket, one representative from each dissecting team descends the auditorium stairs and lays a note of thanks on the dissecting table that will be given to the donor's family.
Then each student lights a candle from the one Lieska holds, and sets it on the table where a body's head would lie. When the last student is done, Lieska asks for a few minutes of silence: The warm candlelight gleams against the cold steel as the students bow their heads in contemplation and prayer.
When the lights come back on and Lieska announces the ceremony's end, the students quickly file out of the hall. Final exams are the following week (although the gross anatomy final was given before spring break in March), and they have intensive studying to do.
Still, the students are grateful to have been given an opportunity to trade contemplation for memorization.
"It had a proper degree of solemnity," Dekoj says. "It was an appropriate thing for us to deal with it. It was a nice way to close it up."
"It's good for us," Barot says. "We're young, we think we're immortal, and because we're med students we're super-ego-maniacal. It pulls you to a place of humility, which is something that doctors need more than any segment of the population. You can't help but be humbled by death."
