July 11, 2023
Dear Family Members and Next of Kin,
Each year, first-year medical and dental students gather to honor with profound gratitude and awe the gift that your family members made to our class. This memorial is held in the springtime, and it is an evening spent celebrating and honoring the life and contribution of each donor. Through musical performances, communal reflections, and the public reading of letters written to us by your loved ones, we honor their lives, pay tribute to their selfless contributions, and express gratitude for their generous gifts that allow us to grow at a formative time in our medical and dental education.
We know that every person’s motivation for donating to our education is different, but by hearing from our donors that night, we are deeply moved by a common thread that resonated in every letter we received: one of love. Love for their clinicians, who they trusted with their lives; love for their communities, which they hoped would be the ultimate beneficiaries of the gift that they made to us; and love for their families, who are the world that they left behind. Ultimately, we also felt that they were expressing love for us — people they did not know, but who they trusted with a most sacred gift.
Newly minted medical students enter classrooms each August for a year of mostly lecture-based teaching. Time spent with donors is a rare opportunity to step out of the classroom and learn from our very first patients. It is in this sacred space that many students are shaped into nascent physicians, understanding the weight of the trust others put into the profession we are embarking on. In deciding to donate to the Anatomical Gift Program, you and your loved ones were promised that their gift would be treated with the utmost respect.
We, as students, are devastated by the actions reportedly taken by an HMS morgue staff member and others outside Harvard, which breached that very trust your loved ones placed in our profession. It is absolutely unthinkable that such an atrocity would ever occur. No words can undo those actions, and while we can never understand how you are feeling, we do hope that we can convey our deepest condolences to you and your loved ones.
With heartfelt sorrow and our sincere gratitude,
Members of the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine Classes
Gratitude through art
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During their first year at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, students attend classes in the anatomy lab. There they are exposed to the structural and mechanistic beauty of the human body.
The two pieces of art shown here were produced for the 2022 HMS donor memorial service by Kelly Li, HMS MD Class of 2025. Following the program, Li presented the pieces to the anatomy lab, where they are now permanently exhibited.
The intertwined hands highlight the beauty of their anatomical structures, while the tree offers a visual thank you to the anatomical donors from all members of the 2022 anatomical program. Each leaf is a thumbprint of a student.