Future docs honor Body donors
Wailing ambulance sirens provided an apropos soundtrack Thursdaymorning when second-year medical students from the University ofArizona honored 130 of the best teachers they will ever have: thosewho donated their bodies for study.
Nearly 110 students from the College of Medicine class of 2010gathered in a campus courtyard to memorialize donors to the WilledBody Program. The program has been in existence since 1967, andstudents have been organizing annual memorial services for aboutseven years.
'The service is put on by students to give our thanks to the manypeople who donated their bodies for our education,' said studentKimberly Insel, who helped plan the service. 'It's important that werecognize these people who gave the ultimate gift.'
Student Tomas Acuna worked with Insel to organize the memorial.
'They're basically our first patients,' he said. 'It's aprivilege to be able to dissect the human body. There's aprofessional attachment, a respect. We spend so much time with thisbody, this person, that I think it's important to have closure.'
Medical students in the college's string quartet and the ScrubsBand provided music at the service, and a tree was planted in memoryof the donors. Some of the students who studied the bodies last yearin their gross-anatomy class spoke about how important it is forfuture physicians to have the type of hands-on experience providedby the donor bodies.
Raquel Cisneros and Mariposa Wolford read a poem they wrote fromthe perspectives of the willing donor and the grateful medicalstudent.
Cisneros and one of her anatomy lab partners, Celeste Rodriguez,talked about the relationship they formed with their donor.
'It's almost like the word 'donor' doesn't do enough to describethem,' Cisneros said.
Rodriguez described the lab partners' initial impression of theolder woman whose body they studied.
'When we first saw her, we saw that she was elegant, beautifuland glamorous under the spotlight,' Rodriguez said, 'so we named herafter another beautiful woman who was in the spotlight - Audrey,after Audrey Hepburn.'
Studying a donor body versus learning about human anatomy from asynthetic model or a computer program takes their understanding to anew level, Rodriguez said.
And, Cisneros said, 'It creates the empathy we need to become aphysician. It reminds you this is real, this is a person.'
Though death is a taboo subject in Navajo culture, DonovanWilliams received special blessings before starting medical school.He invited his father, Harry Williams, of Flagstaff, to the memorialservice to bestow a Navajo prayer on the donors whom Donovan and hisclassmates studied in their anatomy class. The elder Williams burnedcedar chips and used the wood smoke to bless the students.
The UA's Willed Body Program supplies bodies and tissues tohealth-care-education programs statewide. At any given time, 3,500people are registered with the program. Upon their deaths, thedonors' bodies will be used to further medical eduction in thestate.
Last year, the 130 donor bodies that became available wereadequate for study by UA medical students and students at otherhealth-related schools in Arizona. With the recent opening of a UACollege of Medicine satellite campus in Phoenix, though, more donorsare needed for medical study, said Joshua Lopez, director of theWilled Body Program.
When you go ...
* For more information about the Willed Body Program at theUniversity of Arizona College of Medicine, go towbpcba.web.arizona.edu, where enrollment forms are available online,or call 626-1801.
* Contact reporter Kimberly Matas at 573-4191 orkmatas@azstarnet.com. Read more from this reporter at her blog:go.azstarnet.com/lastwrites
