farewell, cadavers

As we embark on the path of healing arts, we will one day, inevitably find ourselves contemplating about life and death. We may find ourselves questioning what medicine can offer, doubt our abilities, knowledge, and perhaps our very own existence because of our simple destiny – death. Perhaps it is because you lost your loved one. May be something went wrong with the patient under your care. May be you were dispatched to a site of a natural disaster. May be you yourself is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Whatever the reason may be, death is a mysterious ultimatum we all face both in our professions and in our persona lives, and most likely we will never quite fully understand what it actually means.

I would like to think that we are able to find peace in ourselves and in our healing professions by always honoring life and encountering each body with thoughtfulness and compassion. It’s been hard with our daily grind of the anatomy course to bring such kindness, our caring healing thoughts to our cadavers. Now is the time for us to take a moment and give our compassion and kindness to these people whose bodies we touched, learned, and examined. Trying to understand life, a human body, comes hand-in-hand with trying to decipher death, and it is both humbling and mystical to have come in such close contact with all that we are made of, and what our own deaths might look like.

For this remarkable opportunity, this profound experience, we thank every one of our cadaver patients, our very first patients, for allowing us to explore forms and functions that make up life, and for us to see just how beautiful and extraordinary human lives are. We honor your life.

***written by yours truly for our cadaver memorial service***

Smith College Smiffenpoofs celebrates 75th Anniversary!

Poofs toured Japan in the summer of 2003. It was quite an experience for all of us. Also, my hometown Sendai was recently hit by the earthquake, and some of the footage seen in the video is not longer there. So congratulations to the generations of FABULOUS folks of Smiffenpoofs, and let me just say, my memories with the Poofs have been some of the best in my life.