Blue and Gray's Anatomy

“In my 25 years here at Georgetown, no one has ever fainted in the anatomy lab,” says Carlos Suarez-Quian, PhD, a professor of biochemistry and molecular & cellular biology who also is course director of gross anatomy at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Suarez-Quian is proud of the anatomy program at GUMC, especially in light of a national shortage of anatomy teachers. He points out that gross anatomy is a teaching-intensive profession that in most medical schools is a part-time job—making recruitment tough, given the high cost of living in the cities where many top academic medical centers are located.

Over the years, fewer and fewer graduate students have opted for a PhD in anatomy, and departments of anatomy have dwindled comparatively. “Today, if you go to a professional meeting of anatomists, you’d probably find the median age to be somewhere around 75 years old,” says Suarez-Quian.

A recent survey conducted by the American Association of Anatomists (AAA) revealed that the basic science faculty in medical schools has become increasingly "cellular and molecular," and that the emphasis on the importance of gross anatomy in the medical school curriculum has lessened nationwide as measured by level of detail and numbers of hours taught. Not so at Georgetown.

At GUMC, students are exposed to 160 hours of anatomy, of which approximately 100 hours are spent in the laboratory. And it’s not just a first-year course. Suarez-Quian enumerates the opportunities to study and master the material. There is the formal curriculum for gross anatomy the first year, and the surgery rotation in the third year, and because there is a summer program for students who want to review, anatomy every year is just a phone call away. “This continuity of anatomical study is pretty rare at most other medical schools,” he says.

When Suarez-Quian is not teaching anatomy, he is busy designing interactive multimedia programs to make anatomical information more accessible to students. In response to the need to offer gross anatomy to GUMC’s 200 Special Master’s Program (SMP) students, he began to create a guided interactive electronic dissector for thorax, abdomen, and pelvis.
This investment in technology has proven successful. “When the SMP students took the exam at the end of the course, even though they hadn’t had access to the cadavers, they had learned the vernacular. This makes them better prepared for medical school.”

Interactive multimedia will never take the place of actual dissection, he explains, because there is a combination of tactile and visual learning that you only get working with a cadaver.

Cadavers, which are donated through a program administered by the school of medicine, are celebrated at the end of the year in a unique, interfaith ceremony celebrating the gift that the donors and their families have given to Georgetown’s medical students. This year’s donor mass takes place on June 8.

The donor mass was started in the early 1980’s by Joseph F. Sweeney, SJ. It started out as a small ceremony honoring families and has grown into a much larger celebration. It used to be held in the tiny medical school chapel in the main classroom building; the ceremony is now held in a large campus auditorium. The families get to meet the medical students and know that their loved ones played an indispensable role in their education as doctors.
To honor each donor family’s religion, the mass is ecumenical, and interfaith prayers from diverse chaplaincy staff are part of the ceremony. “The donor mass is student driven,” says Suarez-Quian. “It brings closure to these students, who’ve spent the year learning very essential anatomy from these cadavers. It’s important for the students to be able to reflect on the fact that these were real people with families who loved them and were willing to let their bodies be used to train physicians, who could then build on that knowledge to save the lives of others.”

By Frank Reider, GUMC Communications