Anatomical Donor Program

The Importance of Dissecting a Human Body

When a medical student peers inside a human body that he or she has just dissected, his or her medical training takes a quantum leap from theory into practice.

After all, a doctor’s patients are real people. And the only way doctors-in-training and healthcare professionals get the chance to immerse themselves in the intricacies of human anatomy comes from dissecting an actual body of a deceased person.

No doubt you will remember your biology classes in high school, where you dissected earthworms and frogs in order to bring the anatomy of these delicate creatures to life. Of course, the anatomy of a frog is vastly simpler than that of a human; yet the principle of discovery and learning through dissection is exactly the same.

Simply put, dissection of a human body by every medical student is nothing less than an indispensable part of a first-rate medical education and of medical research, in general.

Donating Your Body is Essential to Medical Advancement

The only way we can assure that students at Georgetown University School of Medicine will have this indispensable phase of their training depends on concerned persons like you donating their bodies when they pass away. Almost all bodies studied at Georgetown University Medical Center have been donated by generous individuals who wish to benefit the living after their death. Donating your body to science endows a great gift to our future caregivers.

Why Donate Your Body To Georgetown?

Guided by the University’s Jesuit tradition of cura personalis, of caring for the whole person, Georgetown University School of Medicine will educate in an integrated way, knowledgeable, skillful, ethical, and compassionate physicians and biomedical scientists dedicated to the care of others and the health needs of our society.

Georgetown seeks to provide its students with a general professional education in medicine that integrates the scientific, clinical, and humanistic disciplines and lays the ground work for the intellectual and ethical formation of physician-healers, committed to the clinically competent care, and the well being, of their patients.