Beyond life: Body donations turn loss into learning

A collective hush hangs inside the Ohio Union’s Archie M. Griffin Ballroom, where 800 people of all ages sit side-by-side in rows lined with tissue boxes. Friends and family keep to themselves, unfamiliar with other guests and the Ohio State students and faculty scattered about.

Rhoda Allen speaks from a podium about her husband of 62 years, Columbus resident Spencer Allen, and why he chose to bequeath his body to the College of Medicine upon his death on March 14, 2020. Everyone listens with rapt attention.

Spencer was a social worker, loved to write, hiked the Appalachian Trail and donated his body for education and research, out of gratitude for how doctors cared for him during his 91 years. “He said, ‘If I died tomorrow, it would be dying with joy because I know that my body would be going to help and serve others,’” Rhoda says.

She acknowledges a bond with the others in the room. Like her husband, their loved ones also donated their remains to Ohio State’s Body Donation Program, creating a common emotional path that led to this nondenominational Memorial of Gratitude in August. “It’s an uncertain journey in some ways, but a good journey,” Rhoda says.

Grateful patients, health professionals and other selfless people have been choosing to donate their bodies since the College of Medicine started the program in the 1950s. Their generosity has allowed students, physicians and researchers to make medical discoveries, develop innovative technologies and help patients through better prevention and treatment of their conditions.

“Making that decision to further medicine is an incredible gift,” says Danielle Davis, director of Anatomical Services and the Body Donation Program. “It’s humbling that not only are they making that decision, but that the family is entrusting us to have their loved one be an educator. We cannot be more grateful.”

Ohio State receives about 250 bodies a year for scientific study, and those donors pay forward in a way that lives forever: by impacting 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students at the College of Medicine, the College of Dentistry, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and the Division of Anatomy.

“It’s a learning experience you can’t get out of a textbook or a 3D-printed model,” says Hannah Guise ’23, ’25 MS, a doctoral student in anatomical education. “A textbook teaches what the blueprint of the human body should look like, and that’s not going to be every human you interact with. We’re not cookie-cut.”

More than physiological knowledge is gained. Davis says spending extended time with the same donated bodies creates deeper compassion in students training to become health care professionals. They come to understand each body was someone who had family, friends, a singular life. “That’s the humanity aspect of the learning,” she says.

Melissa M. Quinn ’15 PhD considers that idea the most beneficial lesson from her time as an Ohio State graduate student. Now an associate professor of anatomy, she sees her students also gaining compassion because of their work on the bodies, which they refer to as their first patients.

“We’ll always talk to them about technology,” Quinn says. “But our students understand that there’s so much more to being in that space with our human body donors than just learning where the heart is and what these muscles do. They’re learning, ‘What does it mean to be an empathetic physician? What does it mean to care for people?’”

Students aren’t told the names of their donor, or anything about their life, but Guise says they grew to know each of the seven assigned to them over their years at Ohio State. “I can tell you their sex and age,” Guise says, “or if they had a kidney removed or what knee it was if they had a knee replacement. These are people, and they tell a story. You don’t forget any one or the impact they have on you. It sticks.”

At the August service, Guise tears up listening to Rhoda Allen thank Ohio State, the College of Medicine and the Division of Anatomy for fulfilling her husband’s wish with care, sensitivity, dignity and professionalism.

“It gave me a new perspective,” says Guise, primary leader of the Anatomy Memorial Service Committee, a student organization in charge of the annual service. “It really struck me that not only are we doing this service so students can honor the families and say thank you, but it also helps the families to see the other people. They have that connection to each other, so we’re helping them heal and go through their grieving process.”

A familial feeling grows throughout the service. In student testimonials expressed in poem, song and video. In the slow, respectful reading of each name of the 266 body donors from the previous year. And in how the ceremony ends. Everyone had arrived two hours earlier, most of them strangers. Now all are standing as one, 800 strong, singing “Carmen Ohio” together.