c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ As memorial services go it was straightforward, brief _ soft music, dimmed lights and heartfelt verse that moistened the eyes of a few of the students in jeans and sweatshirts who had gathered among the anatomy lab’s coffin-like stainless steel tanks.

This was the end. The students had just completed their final gross-anatomy exam; a blackboard’s chalked invitation announced an off-campus celebration party. But before dispersal, nearly 100 students at Louisiana State University Medical Center gathered for a traditional but little-known memorial: a short, student-led service thanking the 25 strangers whose mortal remains lay in the tanks, and whose bodies the students had come to know in detail, bone and tendon and vessel, on the lab’s dissecting tables.

Each remained anonymous, from the 25-year-old former student who died of a brain tumor to the 81-year-old former cruise line waitress dead of breast cancer.

Each had donated his or her body to science, coming finally to this anatomy lab. In time, each became a teaching tool under the scalpels of first-year students in physical therapy, occupational therapy and cardio-pulmonary science.

“It’s impossible to take a text or computer image or anything else to equal what you get when you see the real thing,” said Dr. Jerry Bagwell, an associate professor of anatomy. “There’s no way under the sun they could’ve learned as much about human anatomy without these bodies they’ve been working on.”

“We’re here to give thanks to these people who’ve given us such a gift,” said Kalyn Gautreaux, who moderated the 15-minute service. She expressed the class’ appreciation for the donors’ “generosity and courage.”

Although little-known, such memorials at the end of anatomy courses have become a tradition at LSU since the early 1970s, Bagwell said.

“The students told us they felt these people were like their first patient and their first teacher. They wanted to have some remembrance, because it didn’t feel right to just shuck their lab coats and leave at the end of the course,” he said.

Because LSU is a state-run university, it could not organize a religious service. But the students could, and a tradition was born.

And because it’s student-run, the ceremony varies from year to year, Bagwell said.

Students put a flower or two atop each closed tank, lit a few candles and said a few words of gratitude mixed with wry affection for their dead teachers, on whom they’d bestowed names over the weeks to dispel the anonymity.

There was Al, a carpenter; Hilda, who loved her own cooking; Fred, a painter with a well-developed upper body; Granny,a housewife all her life.

Each enjoyed “a wicked self-indulgence, cheating death, being useful,” said Tammy Roussel, reading a poem written by a friend, Jeff Wilson.

“We know only simple surface sides,” she continued, “height, weight, occupation, cause of death. Yet we suppose you sat around eating potpies, watching soaps, growing large until pumps failed and valves refused; suppose you had a smile for every passenger; suppose you built a city with bare hands and hammers, yet we know nothing.”

After the service, the remains would be cremated, Bagwell said. The ashes of a few would be returned to families who had requested them; the rest would be interred in a state-owned cemetery.

Before leaving, Roussel and Tiffany Powell, both physical therapy students, raised the remains of Hilda and Fred from their tanks one last time and anointed each with holy water.

“I think sometimes this is as much for the students as the ones being honored,” Bagwell said. “It’s a cleansing, a giving back thanks for the donors making their remains available to us.”

“Rest assured that you will never, ever be forgotten,” wrote Lili Alpaugh in a remembrance she left behind.

“Your contribution will continue to live on, each and every time we treat a patient.

“In this way, all of you have contributed not only to our education, but to the medical treatment of all of our future patients.

“We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. God bless you, and may you rest in peace.”

MJP END NOLAN