Bethany Kette writes about “History Taking in the Anatomy Lab” in the latest issue of JAMA. Kette describes how in medicine we almost always start with the history of the patient, then move on to the physical exam. Kette notes though that “there is one time in our medical careers when we are instructed to perform the most thorough physical examination possible without learning so much as the patient’s name:” that of dissecting a cadaver in anatomy lab.

Now, fifteen years removed from that anatomy lab and ten years into my primary care medical practice, I can attest to the value of history-taking in a relationship developed over time: “It is a closeness and privilege that can provide purpose and meaning to routine acts of medical care.” Yet as medical students learning anatomy through the very intimate process of dissection, we receive very little information about our donors, only their age and cause of death.

In order to better understand the life of the woman who donated her body, Kette created the Obituary Writing Program at Georgetown. Kette developed the program with input from the Literature and Medicine Track director (how great that this is a track in a medical school!) and an obituary writer for the Washington Post. The result allows interested medical students to craft a real narrative about their donors, discover stories “that reveal a life.”

Kette interviews her donor’s son and learns that the woman was a “small-town farm girl” who graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine: “She had literally stood in my footsteps in the same formaldehyde-scented labs in which I had spent the past year with her as my teacher.” The woman eventually retired from medicine to become a painter and was a “devout Catholic;” her faith informed her drive to help others. The medical students who participated in Kette’s program read the obituaries they had written during a ceremony at the end of the year, part of expressing gratitude to the donors themselves and to their loved ones for the gift of the donor’s bodies.

Kette’s program puts “history in its rightful place before the physical— students now interview the families of their donors before making the first cut in anatomy lab.” It also serves as a reminder to those of us well into medical practice that a person’s rich history, their life lived outside the hospital bed or exam room, is what we’re striving in medicine to help them return to, and what matters regarding their health, in the end.