Students Remember Their ‘Teachers’ First-year P&S students met in the Pauline Hartford Memorial Chapel on May 12 to honor individuals who have made a supreme sacrifice to help them learn. The persons honored are not members of P&S faculty. Instead they are the deceased who, in life, donated their bodies to science, so they could be studied in gross anatomy. In a tradition that started in the mid-1970s, Chaplain Daniel Morrissey and Dr. Ernest April, associate professor of anatomy, led a congregation of students in honoring the individuals whose cadavers they examined over the course of this year. The memorial service included literature from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., e.e. cummings, and Robert Test. A poem by Test, "To Remember Me," was the theme of the service. Test wrote his poem on this topic roughly 20 years ago and has since died, leaving his body to science. A passage from the work was printed on memorial cards and handed out to students as they entered the chapel. To pursue their anatomical studies, the students had to disassociate themselves from the cadavers they dissected. As the year comes to a close, Dr. April feels it is important for them to "realize, once again, that these are human beings." The catharsis was not lost on first-year student Matthew Carty, who spoke at the service and performed with fellow students who compose the Ultrasounds, a P&S male, a capella singing club. Afterward, Mr. Carty commented on the meaning of this service: "It’s closure. Closure to a year and an experience that’s pretty bizarre. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What it means to me might not be the same as what it means to another student. But it’s a way to bring to some kind of end or resolution our feelings over the course of the year." The memorial is part of a full spectrum of related services Columbia performs for the donors at no charge to their families. When a body is donated, the university takes responsibility for bringing the body to P&S, embalming and preparing the body for dissection, cremation, memorial services, and ultimately interment at the Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Columbia has used donated graves since the mid-1800s. The donors’ plot is marked with a stone that reads, "In memory of those whose bequeathal to Columbia advanced medical science."