Students honor donors of bodies

This year marks the 30th year since the beginning of the Willed Body Program.

ARIZONA DAILY STAR

TUCSON, Ariz. — Wailing ambulance sirens provided an apropos soundtrack last week when second-year medical students from the University of Arizona honored 130 of the best teachers they will ever have: those who donated their bodies for study.

Nearly 110 students from the College of Medicine class of 2010 gathered in a campus courtyard to memorialize donors to the Willed Body Program. The program has been in existence since 1967, and students have been organizing annual memorial services for about seven years.

“The service is put on by students to give our thanks to the many people who donated their bodies for our education,” said student Kimberly Insel, who helped plan the service. “It’s important that we recognize 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 a privilege to be able to dissect the human body. There’s a professional attachment, a respect. We spend so much time with this body, this person, that I think it’s important to have closure.”

About the service

Medical students in the college’s string quartet and the Scrubs Band provided music at the service, and a tree was planted in memory of the donors. Some of the students who studied the bodies last year in their gross-anatomy class spoke about how important it is for future physicians to have the type of hands-on experience provided by the donor bodies.

Raquel Cisneros and Mariposa Wolford read a poem they wrote from the perspectives of the willing donor and the grateful medical student.

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 describe them,” Cisneros said.

Rodriguez described the lab partners’ initial impression of the older woman whose body they studied.

“When we first saw her, we saw that she was elegant, beautiful and glamorous under the spotlight,” Rodriguez said, “so we named her after another beautiful woman who was in the spotlight — Audrey, after Audrey Hepburn.”

A new understanding

Studying a donor body versus learning about human anatomy from a synthetic model or a computer program takes their understanding to a new level, Rodriguez said.

And, Cisneros said, “It creates the empathy we need to become a physician. It reminds you this is real, this is a person.”

Though death is a taboo subject in Navajo culture, Donovan Williams received special blessings before starting medical school. He invited his father, Harry Williams, of Flagstaff, to the memorial service to bestow a Navajo prayer on the donors whom Donovan and his classmates studied in their anatomy class. The elder Williams burned cedar chips and used the wood smoke to bless the students.

The Willed Body Program supplies bodies and tissues to health-care-education programs statewide. At any given time, 3,500 people are registered with the program. Upon their deaths, the donors’ bodies will be used to further medical education in the state.