Willed Body Memorial Speech

Medicine is full of sacrifices. Physicians and nurses give up time with their families to help a last minute patient. Medical students give up a good portion of time, money and youth to study. We have blood donations and bone marrow donations and even full organ donations. However, donating your body to the Willed Body Memorial program requires a special kind of trust and sacrifice because the benefits aren’t as tangible. If someone decides to donate a kidney, there’s an immediate payoff – you know right away that you helped to save someone’s life. Donating your body, and conversely, honoring a loved one’s wish to donate their body, to a medical school program requires patience and understanding and trust, and most importantly, the ability to see the big picture. It’s a sacrifice bigger than most people are willing to make, so thank you.

I thank you and your loved ones, our donors, for that patience and trust. I’m thanking you not only because that kind of selflessness is imperative to my education as a doctor, but because 25 years ago, my family was in the exact same place.

25 years ago, my great grandmother donated her body to the University of Michigan Anatomical Donations Program.

My great-grandmother, Anna Cora Tretchler Babcock, was first and foremost a teacher. She started teaching when she was 18, at a one room school house. She taught until she got married and was forced to give up her job – at that time, married women weren’t permitted to work. Despite not being able to teach in a classroom setting, she was still a teacher at heart. She raised 7 children and taught them how to read and sew and cook and run a farm. When my great-grandfather, Gordon Babcock, died of Mustard Gas Poisoning from WWI, she allowed a full autopsy to be performed because she hoped that the doctors would be able to learn something from his case, and be able to help other young veterans in the future. She imparted on my grandfather a healthy curiosity for medicine and science, which he passed down to my mother and me, and is probably the main reason I decided to become a doctor. She had so much respect for the medical community that she made the decision to donate her own body – if death was inevitable, as she well knew it was, she wanted to make sure somebody could learn something from it.

I never got to meet my great-grandmother…she died a few years before I was born. But I am living proof of her legacy – I have her love of sewing, and I know the secret ingredient in her blueberry dessert. I have her independence and her love of medicine, so much that I am the first person in my family to go to medical school. But more importantly, she left a legacy to about a hundred other students. There are doctors, practicing medicine as we speak, that are able to do what they do because my great-grandmother wanted to give one final lesson.

This is the same legacy that your loved ones have passed on to this generation of future doctors.

We have learned so much from your loved ones – and yet we know so little about them. It’s a caveat of medical school that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and that can be a little scary at times.

I can tell you the size and shape of someone’s heart – but I can’t tell you what made it stir. I can describe the path of a nerve as it exits the spinal cord and weaves its way done to the fingertips – but I don’t know the last thing they touched. I can name every single part of their brain, but I can’t tell you what made them laugh or smile or what their favorite TV show was. I know so little about these people, these people who donated their bodies so that I could learn to become a physician, and yet….

I know they were brave. I know they were brave because death can be scary. We don’t like talking about it, even us in the medical profession who deal with it every day. But these brave people not only accepted that they were going to die someday, but they chose to make a plan.

I know they were selfless. I know they were selfless because it requires a selfless act to donate to a cause that they will never reap any direct benefits from.

I know they had faith. I know they had faith, because they entrusted a generation of medical students that they had never met. They trusted us that we would not only respect their bodies and take care of them, but that we would learn from them.

And that’s the greatest and most terrifying demonstration of trust I’ve ever known. There’s been a lot of negative press for my generation – we’re self absorbed, we spend too much time on the internet, we don’t know how to communicate, the list goes on and on. So the fact that these wonderful people trusted us enough with their body, with their last legacy – it gives me hope, and it makes me shoulder my responsibilities a little more carefully.

It’s a wonderful burden to live with every day, because the donors are really our first patients. We may not be able to heal them, but we are still entrusted with their care. It’s a reminder of all the patients I have yet to meet, who will also be placing their trust in me. And it’s inspiring: if these unknown donors can have such blind faith in me, then maybe I can have a little more faith in others too. 

So once again, thank you. Thank you for trusting us with your loved ones. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for understanding that we literally could not become the doctors we are hoping to be without these donors. From the time my great-grandmother decided to donate her body to today, life has a funny way of coming full circle, and I am so honored to be a part of that legacy.

Thank you.