Tribute to those who bequeath their bodies to medical science

Tribute to those who bequeath their bodies to medical science

In Memoriam is an anthology bringing together the work of professional writers and students as a tribute to the selfless people who bequeath their bodies for the teaching and research of medical students and staff.

Launching on 18 February in Dundee, the theme of the book is Death and Life. Within it, Dundee University Chaplain, Fiona Douglas, has written about the gratitude of the students for their ’Silent Tutors’ and their annual Service of Thanksgiving.

As well as life stories of some of the people who donated their bodies to medical science, the book includes a selection of poetry, elegy and prose. Contributors include:

• John Carey, emeritus professor at Oxford
• Costa Book of the Year Winner, Christopher Reid
• Alan Warner, the Scottish novelist whose Morven Callar and The Sopranos have been made into films.

A sequence of photographs by Calum Colvin gives a haunting image of the singular life moving from light to shadow, and the book includes a beautiful piece by Professor Aidan Day on Tennyson’s haunting poem, In Memoria.

Christopher Reid, whose wife bequeathed her body to medical science, has contributed a new poem in which he writes:

Yet he’d felt her floating away

like the belle of the ball,

rapt in the embrace

of a rival partner,

while he had had to look on:

envious, impotent, shrivelling,

back to the wall

 

In Memoriam is being launched on Saturday 18 February 2012 at 6pm in the University of Dundee’s Dalhousie Building. More information is available here: weblink.

More information about donating your body to medical science is available here: weblink.