Chau Lam and Jennifer Barrios report:
A resident physician at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital apologized to faculty members over the weekend for posting a photograph of a former classmate giving two thumbs up next to a cadaver as state health officials said they would be looking into the matter.
In three separate e-mails, Erica Katz, who works in the emergency medicine unit at Stony Brook University Medical Center, told faculty members that posting the photo on her Facebook page was a mistake.
“It was absolutely and unquestionably egregious, idiotic, disrespectful and thoughtless for me to ever have taken that picture, and exponentially worse to have posted in on Facebook,” she wrote in one of the letters referring to the photograph she said she took several years ago.
[…]
Dean Richard Fine on Monday met with faculty members, who referred the matter to the committee on academic standards. That panel will make recommendations to Fine on what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Katz.
Fine will have the final say.
The medical school will also develop a social media policy, a set of guidelines that will lay out for students what is appropriate and not appropriate to post on social networking sites.
Further, the school will formalize and put into writing what has been an unofficial policy of prohibiting students from taking pictures in anatomy class.
The incident caught the attention of the state department of health, which regulates the handling of cadavers.
“We expect that they will be taking appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen again,” said state health department spokeswoman Claire Pospisil.
Read more of this Newsday story via the Boston Herald.
H/T, Scott Greenfield