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Most physicians could list the benefits of getting to know the people they treat. Not everyone will walk into an exam room and open up with complete transparency; in some cases, an accurate diagnosis can depend on a physician’s ability to engage with his or her patients.

In highly emotional situations, though, some doctors can find it hard to do so. Physicians have “taught themselves to see this distress and ignore it,” says Jerry Vannatta, the former executive dean of OU College of Medicine. “They know it’s there, but instead of engaging in the distress, saying, ‘My goodnes­s, you look sad, tell me about that,’ they ignore it and say, ‘So how’s the chemo going? You getting the radiation? Any nausea?’” Now a professor of medicine at the university, Vannatta researches and teaches a course on narrative medicine, an emerging field that uses storytelling and literature to help physicians learn to better relate to their patients.

He’s also the founder of the Donor Luncheon, as it’s called. The meal is the first lesson students receive at OU College of Medicine. Vannatta got the idea for the program in 2000, while in Taiwan to teach a workshop on American medical-education practices. He asked the workshop attendees, faculty from 10 Taiwanese medical schools, to each tell him about something unique to their respective institutions. A physician from Tzu Chi University College of Medicine told him that his school has recently implemented a program to remove the cultural stigma of disturbing the dead: The families of anatomical donors were invited to join the students in a Buddhist prayer ceremony before dissections began, and the school had built a hall of honor to display the cremated remains of previous donors, now referred to as “honorable teachers.”

Vannatta immediately recognized the potential. “I said, ‘You bring your students in? These students who are going to dissect that body, and they meet with the family?’” he told me. “‘That’s one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever heard!’” He organized the first Donor Luncheon for the following academic year.

His initial hope for the Donor Luncheon, Vannatta said, was that it might equip the students to better cope with the dissection, which can be a traumatic experience. “To walk into a room and start cutting up a human being’s body, it’s not normal,” he said.

The natural response, he explained, is to find some way to deflect the strangeness of the situation—a need that often manifests itself as gallows humor. Students may invent stories about their cadaver or perform what Vannatta called “cadaver tricks,” in which the bodies will be objectified for comedic effect. A group of students might open the tank holding their cadaver and find the body wearing a bow tie, for example, or a student might enter the lab for a late-night study session and see his cadaver propped up and staring at him. In 2013, a University of Pennsylvania study examined what is perhaps the most common coping mechanism seen in the lab: cadaver naming. Two-thirds of the medical students surveyed (1,152 from 12 different medical schools) gave their cadavers nicknames, many of them unflattering references to a specific bodily feature. A particularly wrinkly donor, for example, was named “A Wrinkle in Time,” a donor with an abnormally large heart was “The Tin Man,” and a donor who died of respiratory failure was known as “Wheezy.”