Today, 181 brand new doctors will stride across a stage at the University of Michigan, ready to take on the world and become tomorrow’s health care leaders.
One by one, the members of the Medical School’s 165th graduating class will shake the dean’s hand, pose for a picture — and receive a rolled-up parchment that proves they have completed their medical training at one of the nation’s top institutions.
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As they leave the stage, they’ll take their first steps as physicians — and enter the next phase of training in residency programs that will prepare them to practice in a specific medical field.
But wherever they go next, that diploma will hang on the wall of their home or office, and remind them daily of the community where they first learned the art and science of doctoring.
Written in Latin, each diploma is signed by hand by every department chair in the Medical School, as well as the dean, Dr. James O. Woolliscroft.
The signing tradition, which now includes 29 department chairs, goes back decades. As the school grew and added more departments, the process of signing each diploma became more complex — but the tradition lives on with the help of staff in the Office of Medical Student Education.
In keeping with tradition, the signers don’t just sign in any order. Instead, they sign in order of their seniority, according to how many years they have served as chair.
So the signature of Dr. John Voorhees, who has chaired the Department of Dermatology for 40 years, appears just below the dean’s.
And since the diplomas are in Latin, there are separate versions for men and women, to have the correct gender-specific pronoun and other parts of speech. Staff members make sure that enough of each version get signed for this year’s graduating class of 92 women and 89 men.
More than a decade ago, one extra — but not truly authentic — diploma with a female pronoun was made for the set of the television show “House, M.D.” It adorned the office of the fictional hospital leader, Dr. Lisa Cuddy, who like Dr. Gregory House was supposed to have graduated from U-M.
In the end, all this additional work gives the school’s real-life graduates a truly unique diploma to carry with them wherever they go — a diploma as unique as their U-M education.
