Medical students' encounters with the cadaver: A poetic response

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Abstract
For the past four years, the Human Values in Medicine program at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine has sponsored the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition for medical students (U. S. only). With over 1700 entries from hundreds of students representing nearly every medical school in the U.S., the competition has been highly successful. The pervasive themes expressed in the poetry have included personal experiences and relationships outside of medicine, the medical school experience, nature, and the physician-patient encounter. Within this last theme, I found dozens of poems on the medical student's encounter with the cadaver. This paper examines what the medical student-poets wrote about that experience. The texts of the twenty poems each fell into one of the following categories: the attempt of the student to know the cadaver as a person, the medical secrets students discovered through dissection, and the intimate relationship between student and cadaver. Discussion and excerpts from the poetry which illuminate each category are found in the following narrative.

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