title: The 2008 anatomy ceremony: essays.
abstract: When asked to relate my experience of anatomy to the first-year medical and physician associate students at Yale before the start of their own first dissection, I found no better words to share than those of my classmates. Why speak with only one tongue, I said, when you can draw on 99 others? Anatomical dissection elicits what our course director, Lawrence Rizzolo, has called a "diversity of experience," which, in turn, engenders a diversity of expressions. For Yale medical and physician associate students, this diversity is captured each year in a ceremony dedicated to those who donated their bodies for dissection. The service is an opportunity to offer thanks, but because only students and faculty are in attendance, it is also a place to share and address the complicated tensions that arise while examining, invading, and ultimately disassembling another's body. It is our pleasure to present selected pieces from the ceremony to the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine readership.
authors.affiliation: Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
authors.forename: Mei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Elansary
authors.forename: Ben
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Goldberg
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Qian
authors.forename: Lawrence J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Rizzolo