RE: The future of Histotechs

From:Andrew Shand

If you worked in the UK Joyce you would find it impossible to do that.  Our response to the Alder Hay scandal has been to produce an environment in which, though we can host the plastinated body exhibition,  none of us would contemplate such educational activities - even if we had full consent, permission forms pasted all over our tired little bodies.
 
Andy Shand
-----Original Message-----
From: Weems, Joyce [mailto:JWEEMS@sjha.org]
Sent: 24 October 2002 15:11
To: HISTONET@pathology.swmed.edu
Subject: RE: The future of Histotechs

 

We have a collection of specimens that we loan to health care professionals to show in schools in the area. The response is amazing. Our employees and physicians use them often for their children’s science/health class. We have slices of lungs  - normal, emphysema, and cancer, a heart-lung combo with an embolus, several hearts – bypass, normal, valves, etc.  liver – normal and alcoholic, kidneys, and a brain that are the most popular ones. We talk about smoking, too much alcohol, not eating properly, etc. When I do this (I have been requested a couple of times)  I talk about Histology – taking along a poster board showing the process of handling a gallbladder – and then show a collection of stones.

 

I will now request that we all talk about this profession – sent the ASCP powerpoint program to a doc just now!

 

One of the most amazing things is that we have a heart transplant patient who does this. He requested the specimens at the suggestion of one of the nurses a couple years after I started working here. We got to know each other and became friends. He had a life changing spiritual experience shortly before he received his new heart, in fact a death experience, and has become a spiritual and educational mentor for many young people. When I came here we had hearts everywhere – and I got the bright idea to find his. Our pathologist allowed me to give it to him. He not only speaks at schools, but at churches. When he brings out his very own heart, everyone is touched and amazed. (I tell him he is the only one I know who truly has his heart in his hand!)

 

Joyce Weems

Pathology Manager

Saint Joseph’s Hospital of Atlanta

404-851-7376

404-851-7831 - fax

 




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