This couple made a crucial donation to McMaster: their own dead bodies

On May 25, 2022, 90-year-old Geoffrey Hunt died of a broken heart.

Marguerite Hunt, his wife of 65 years, had passed just 13 days earlier. Although they were devastated at the loss of their mother, the couple's daughters, Justine Mills and Gillian Shortt, took it upon themselves to make all the final arrangements.

Unlike the experience with a lot of funeral or cremation services, their job was pretty easy. Most of it was taken care of with just one phone call - to Maureen Letang, the bequeathal co-ordinator for McMaster University's Education Program in Anatomy. Marguerite's final wishes had been for her body be donated to the school so that she could become a teacher" for future surgeons.

She (Letang) called me back within an hour," recalled Shortt. And she said, Gillian, we would be honoured to have your mother teach at McMaster.'"

When we were making the arrangements for our mother, my dad said, Well, sign me up too, because I'll be in there shortly as well,'" added her sister, Justine. And we all kind of laughed. But we were worried because we knew he was heartbroken.

So, it's sad, but they're still together."

They're still together" because Geoffrey also donated his body to McMaster in Hamilton. He learned about it from his granddaughter, Colleen Shortt, who knew about it because she was working on her PhD at McMaster.

My daughter was telling my father all about it, and he joked that, Nobody would want this old body,'" Shortt said. And my daughter explained that he actually had the ideal body for students to study because they can see all the things that went wrong. He said, OK, that's it.'"

And, sadly, 13 days after his wife became a teacher" at McMaster, so did he.

McMaster's students and faculty are always grateful for donations. Everyone is especially thankful right now since, as a result of the pandemic, the school doesn't have enough bodies for students when they return to in-person learning this fall.

At the onset of the really acute phase of COVID, everyone was told not to come in," explained Dr. Bruce Wainman, director of McMaster's anatomy program and the surgical skills laboratory. Because it takes a lot of staff time to prepare them, there was no way that we were going to be able to bring in bodies at that point. It just was impossible."

When bodies arrive at McMaster, the staff has to decide what type of teaching" they'll be doing. That determines the method of preservation.

It's a complex calculation, because sometimes we preserve the body for long-term educational purposes, in which case we would use formaldehyde," says Wainman. But when we're doing surgical skills, the skin has to be more supple and more lifelike.

If someone's practising, say, hip replacements or knee replacements, the ligaments and tendons all have to respond in the way they would in the operating room, so, for that, we use ethanol."

Given the recent interruption and the global move to make everything as virtual as possible, we might have expected schools to develop more computer-based surgical skills programs. They do exist, but it turns out, they can't replace old-school anatomy classes.

Virtual simulation is really useful and a really important part of surgical and medical training, but the real-life experience is absolutely necessary to learning how to do the job," says Dr. Abi Kirubarajan, surgeon and resident in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

There's no comparison to a real person," she continued. We were always told that, for surgeons, your first patient is actually the donated body in anatomy class because that's how we learn how intricate and how unique every body is."

Just like blood and organ donations, body donors are a crucial component of our health-care system.

Without it, we would really have no surgical skills and no really effective anatomy teaching," said Wainman who, once a year, invites families to a Service of Gratitude" ceremony to explain to loved ones why these donations are so important to the school.

When I started doing these services 17 years ago, I was petrified because there were 150 very sad people in front of me," he said. And yet, when I got up and told people how important they were, how grateful we were and how much we valued the altruism of the donors and appreciated the support of the families, everyone left happy.

All these people have experienced a profound loss, and they all leave feeling better about what happened," he continued. It's really a miracle."

Wainman calls the donors and their families some of the best people you're likely to meet."

Marguerite and Geoffrey Hunt certainly fit the bill.

They both firmly believed in the value of education in any form," says Mills. So they were able to fulfil two things at once: be together and still help. They're still doing something. They're still teaching people."

They were always very civic-minded and always wanted to do volunteer work," Shortt adds. This was just their final way of giving back."

To reach Maureen Letang, the bequeathal co-ordinator at McMaster University, contact anatprg@mcmaster.ca or, by phone, 905-525-9140 x22273.

Christine Sismondo is a Toronto-based writer and contributor to the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @sismondo