Med students honor bodies donated to science

As they made their first incisions last fall, the first-year medical school students in Old Westbury never forgot that the cadavers they cut into once had lives, families and people who loved them.

Thursday, as the more than 200 students at the New York Institute of Technology's New York College of Osteopathic Medicine marked the end of their first year, they carried on a hallowed tradition at the school.

They paid tribute to the men and women who had agreed in life to have their bodies studied after death.

It was part tribute, part education, said school officials.

The goal, said Dr. Robert V. Hill, chairman of the college's Department of Anatomy, is to teach the future physicians that seeing patients as people and not just body parts will "translate later at the bedside as compassion."

As part of the tradition, students laid roses at a campus memorial engraved with the message "Your bodies were the first to teach." And in a ceremony in the college auditorium, the students read poems and letters written to those they studied.

Yasir Saleem, 23, of Manchester, Conn., read one of several poems students had written.

Saleem said the man he'd studied in basic anatomy class had been named Malcolm, and had died in his 80s from heart and lung disease.

"Somewhere out there/ Your family wept/ You were someone's husband . . . /Someone's father/ Someone's world," read Saleem. "But even in death you gave/ You gave an opportunity to learn/ To experience/ To reach our own dreams of helping strangers."

The tradition is followed at most osteopathic schools, said Linda Darroch-Short, the college's director of Student Life, who helped create the program. At the Old Westbury college, it had been done quietly in the past, perhaps with a moment of silence at the end of the school year. The remembrance was expanded about four years ago, when a student, Nicholas Beatty, told school officials he was bothered by how his classmates' initial focus and wonder about the people they examined would fade into the details of blood vessels and nerves.

Beatty, now 31, who is graduating and beginning a residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan later this year, said he suggested students write poems and letters at the end of the school year to reflect on the cadavers they studied.

"Minuscule nerves, subtle vessels/ Created your smile/ Allowed for a warm embrace/ They say that old age imparts wisdom/ But did you know that you would grant wisdom/ Following Death?" read Sarah Van Dine, 24, of Glen Cove.