Take My Hand
I do not know what to say or feel when I first meet you. My first instinct is to introduce myself, but you can neither hear me nor reply.
Tag: Anatomy Lab
Contributing Writer
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Jillian is a medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey class of 2027. In 2020, she graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in biology. She enjoys writing, singing and practicing archery in her free time. In the future, Jillian would like to pursue a career in dermatology.
Dissecting Anatomy Lab: Epilogue
I no longer feel alone the way that I did the first few weeks of dissections, because now I recognize that my peers were sectioned off at their tables also worried that they were losing their sensitivity, that they weren’t good enough to belong, and they didn’t know how to cut into a person. I wish that I had known what my classmates were thinking and feeling during the anatomy course.
Dissecting Anatomy Lab: The Final Disposition
Why would someone choose to donate their body to medical education? We have a dishonorable history in medicine of illicitly sourcing cadavers for dissection: robbing corpses from graves, murdering people for their bodies and salvaging the unclaimed dead from city hospitals and morgues. Today, we call the bodies we learn from “donors” instead of “cadavers” to honor their autonomy and personhood, their choice to be in the room.
Dissecting Anatomy Lab: The Lifecycle of Anatomy Instruction
It is the day before the first anatomy lab for the first-year medical students, and a single professor walks alone, up and down rows of tables laden with 26 naked, embalmed bodies. He silently shares a few minutes with the donors, a private thank-you. Soon the donors will be covered in white sheets, and the students will tentatively spill through the locked wooden doors of the labs, a rush of anticipation, teamwork, questions and learning.
Dissecting Anatomy Lab: The Assembly of a Medical Student
In the golden glow of a fall day, 104 first-year medical students parade out of the medical center carrying boxes of bones to aide our anatomy lab studies. The crates look suspiciously like instrument cases, perhaps the size of an alto saxophone, and it feels absurd to march back to our houses a la The Music Man, knowing all the while that we are bringing real live (well, dead) human skeletons into our living rooms, kitchens and coat closets.
Dissecting Anatomy Lab: Introduction
Over the next four weeks, I will share a series of essays with you in which I tell some of those stories. This writing results from the work of a summer, supported by a summer research fellowship in Medical Humanities & Bioethics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, in which I interviewed nine first-year medical students, two third-year medical students, eight anatomy and medical humanities professors, two Anatomical Gift Program staff, three palliative care clinicians, two preregistered donors and one donor’s family member.
Lessons from Anatomy Lab
It was not until our second semester of medical school that we started gross anatomy. Finally, I became that quintessential medical student walking home too tired to change out of my formaldehyde-tinged scrubs.
Contributing Writer
George Washington University School of Medicine
Amira Athanasios is fourth year medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. In 2015, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is passionate about the intersections of health, culture, religion, and humanities. After medical school, she hopes to pursue a career in child and adolescent psychiatry.