Wits Health Sciences Students Stop to Respect the Dead
- L. Rautenbach
Health Sciences students at Wits undertake a dedication ceremony before their study of the human body begins.
On the 4th floor of the Health Sciences Building, in a vast laboratory-like room called a Dissection Hall, Professor Maryna Steyn, head of the School of Anatomical Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits, welcomes more than three hundred health sciences students to a unique time-honored Wits tradition – the Cadaver Dedication Ceremony.
Wits is still one of the few universities in South Africa that practice full body human dissection, thanks to a successful body donation programme undertaken by the school. Bequests are made to the school for the furtherance of medical research and teaching for medical and therapeutic sciences' students. At the end of the year of dissection, the bodies are cremated and laid to rest in accordance with the donor or families wishes.
While the body donation programme uses precious resources in the school, that might otherwise be replaced by high-tech technology including virtual reality, it’s this the physical and emotional process of dissection that Professor Maryna Steyn, head of the School of Anatomical Sciences, feels makes for the ultimate teaching experience as well as a better engagement with the human patient in the long term.
Speaking at the ceremony, where some of the more than 100 body donations lie under white plastic sheeting, Prof Steyn highlights to students that these bodies once human beings, will be their first and most precious teacher. “Without these cadavers that we are honouring today, your studies of medicine and anatomy would not be possible. Please take the time to think about the body in front of you and all the bodies in this hall. Think about their beauty and the fact that they were created so perfectly. Never forget that these individuals were once living, breathing individuals; that just would still have been walking the streets, sharing loves and laughter, sharing lives with their families."
The cadaver will teach these young students many things - technical terms, medical terms, how the systems of the body connect and interrelate. But mostly says Prof Steyn - “ they will teach you about yourself and your capacity for compassion and respect”. While anatomy in this sense allows the opportunity for students to explore their own humanness, there is a very strict sense of the respect required for those deceased. Students undertake what they will wear, how they will behave in the hall and in the presence of these bodies and are reminded that how they treat this first patient will set a precedent for how the treat every patient in their journey to become health professionals.
To conclude this ceremony the students stand and collectively read The Student's Creed. Stopping to respect the dead, observing high codes of moral ethics and engendering patient compassion are key elements of Wits’ success in producing some of the finest health practitioners and scientists around the world.