Wearing all black underneath their white lab coats, the students laid on the floor of the medical school atrium for 4 ½ minutes of silence. This represented the number of hours it took for St. Louis area medical examiners to retrieve the body of 18-year-old Michael Brown from a street in Ferguson, Mo., after he was fatally shot by police in August.
Students then spoke about social justice and civil rights emphasizing the need to push beyond the professional code of the Hippocratic Oath to take a much more radical and encompassing position.
“We stand here now to hold each other accountable to the missions of using the privilege confirmed by these white coats to promote equity, compassion and justice,” said first-year medical student Camille Beecher. “Our history ends with the present. From this moment on, we’ll push beyond ‘do no harm,’ to ‘do the right thing.’”
The "die-in" was held in concert with medical schools across the United States, which staged similar protests as part of International Human Rights Day. It was featured in a report on MSNBC.
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