Students honor anatomical donors at Anschutz Medical Campus
(May 9, 2008) Students at UC Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus organized a memorial service May 8 in to honor anatomical donors and their families. School of Medicine Dean Richard Krugman wrote in his weekly faculty staff newsletter that this all started in 1986. "Several first-year medical students brought flowers into the Anatomy Lab on the last day of the course, and the students informally said some words about how meaningful the experience was to them. Over the next decade, the class decided to have an actual memorial service which then-University Hospital Chaplain Julie Swaney and then-Associate Dean for Student Affairs Nancy Nelson, MD, helped them organize.
“The service was held in the courtyard in front of Denison Library; it was just for the students and was always very moving. In 1995, the Class of 1999 decided to invite the families of the donors and the service took on a whole new dimension. The families are enormously appreciative of this gesture of thanks by our students and the stories they tell are wonderful to hear. And listening to the medical, dental, physical therapy and physician assistant students last Friday afternoon, it is clear that the ceremony is a good one for them, as well,” he wrote.
“We had to make a decision a decade ago as to whether we should continue the gross anatomy lab and plan for space in the new Educational buildings we were then designing,” Krugman said. “There are a number of schools of medicine in the United States that have abandoned the practice, using texts, the Visible Human and preserved specimens to teach the course. I have no doubt that the facts of anatomy can be learned without the use of anatomic donors, but I am also absolutely convinced that this exercise, and services like last Friday’s, preserve a compassion for humanity that is an integral part of the professional growth of our students and helps the public understand our mission."