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Ritual lets med students bid farewell to cadavers |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 14 March 2005 |
'I'll always remember their faces,' student says.
By Larry Keller
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 12, 2005
BOCA RATON — To the ethereal sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, 16 first-year medical students at Florida Atlantic University bid farewell Friday to Anna Marie, Meredith, Chet and Sal.
Those aren't the real names of the four cadavers the students have been slicing, sawing and probing since November in a fourth-floor laboratory in the biomedical science building. They don't know their true names. So these are the names they gave them.
"We're here to celebrate the lives and deaths of the people who have taught us," Robert Blanks, professor of biomedical science, who organized the solemn closing ritual, told the students in the darkened lab, illuminated only by candles.
The students are enrolled at the University of Miami School of Medicine, but are taking the first two years of their courses at FAU.
Only 30 minutes earlier, they had finished a four-hour final exam in Gross Anatomy, which included two hours identifying which nerves and muscles were beneath colorful pins protruding brightly from what was left of the corpses they had toiled over the past five months.
The lab, with its stainless-steel gurneys and cabinets, was stark and sterile. But now, as students reentered the room, the stink of formaldehyde was replaced by the sensual scent of incense. Buddhist chants filled the room. And each student was handed a candle and formed a circle near the gurneys, now adorned with elegant flowers, not dissected corpses.
One by one each person made brief remarks, expressing appreciation for the dead from whom they learned and thanking their teachers and fellow students for their shared experiences. After speaking, each person used their lighted candle to illuminate that of the student next to them.
"They say the body is the temple of the soul," said Fanny Bangoura, 28, of Cooper City. "I'm grateful people donated their temples for us to explore."
"I often found myself imagining what they were like when they were alive," said Gia Marotta, 26, of Boca Raton. "I'll always remember their faces."
Students' reactions to working on the dead varied as much as their subjects. "You just focus on the task at hand," Bangoura said outside the lab.
For Marotta, it wasn't that easy. "When you go home and study ... you can visualize them," she said. "For me, one woman had freckles on her chest. I thought she must have liked being outdoors. That's the part that made me connect."
Scandals plague programs
The use of cadavers in medical school programs has been plagued by scandals in recent years. This week a jury awarded $800,000 in compensatory damages to the husband and daughter of a woman who was embalmed by Lynn University students in that school's since-canceled funeral services program.
The Boca Raton school relinquished its embalming license in 2003, and two top officials paid fines following accusations that the students embalmed bodies without family consent.
UCLA's body donor program was suspended last year after the director and another person were arrested in a probe into the selling of body parts to medical companies for profit.
The director of the University of California at Irvine program was fired after selling spines to a Phoenix hospital in 1999. The university also was unable to account for hundreds of willed bodies.
When Tulane University had a surplus of bodies, it called a body broker, assuming the broker would ship the bodies to other universities. But the broker sold the bodies to the Army, which blew up seven of them in land-mine experiments.
Blanks was a professor for many years at UC-Irvine, but not involved in that school's problems. He said FAU gets its cadavers from a central state repository. After Friday's closing ritual, the four corpses used at FAU will be taken to Miami for cremation, he said. The cremains will be scattered at sea or given to family members.
His students say that Blanks makes it clear that cadavers are to be treated with respect. "You're working on people who were mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters," he tells them.
"These are not frogs in a biomedical lab," added his teaching colleague, Douglas Broadfield, an assistant professor of anthropology and biomedical science. "They're all individuals. We do take it very seriously."
Cadaver use on the decline
The use of cadavers by medical schools has been waning. Some faculty think that students can learn about human anatomy from studying pre-dissected bodies and body parts or from computer simulations. Others, however, contend that there is no substitute for learning from a real human body.
Blanks is in the latter camp — at least when it comes to teaching future surgeons.
"If you're training surgeons, you have to have the cadaver experience," he said. "It's absolutely necessary they have access to human remains."
Broadfield agrees. "There's no substitute for human dissection," he said. "This is the first person they encounter in medicine where they don't have to be concerned about their health."
Back at the closing ritual in the lab, students and teachers finished their remarks, and a melancholy song filled the room with the lyrics: "Gently, gently. Resting sweetly."
Some bowed their heads in reflection, faces aglow in the candlelight.
Then the bright lab lights came on again, and Blanks spoke one last time.
"Go out and make a new world."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2005/03/12/s1a_fau_0312.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery. You can't do any business from there.” Col. Harland Sanders
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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