![]() ![]() In these instances, cadavers are dissected by medical students, though some institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic, may use bodies for research. Most individuals imagine donation to a medical school, called anatomical donation or whole body donation. The reality of donation, though, can be murky. Detail from Resurrectionists (1847), by Hablot Knight Browne, showing eighteenth-century graverobbers John Holmes and Peter Williams. In 2019 alone, an estimated 20,000 people donated their bodies to science. For example, the company ScienceCare celebrates that “body donors pave the way for the medical community to help future generations live longer, healthier lives.” With the average American funeral costing over $7,000, many families choose donation as a low-cost option. Today, we celebrate donation as a noble sacrifice, and many companies rely on this to acquire their materials. The 1968 Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a federal law passed in response to the rise of transplant surgeries, helped standardize who could donate bodies and who could receive them. Public concerns about the rising cost of funerals also helped shift cultural attitudes toward donation. By the 1950s, poor families relied on mutual aid societies and Social Security to offset the costs of burial, decreasing the number of available remains. Initially, states passed anatomy acts to provide medical schools with unclaimed bodies from the morgue, but this supply could be inconsistent. ![]() Regulated body donation programs in the United States developed during the twentieth century, marking a significant turn away from the illegal graverobbing used by early American medical schools to find “material” for dissection. Death Science charged attendees of Saunders’s autopsy up to $500 a ticket, which were sold through the Oddities and Curiosities Expo website.Ĭompanies like Med Ed Labs benefit from the good will that anatomical donation has engendered in the last seventy-five years. Although representatives from these companies have not disclosed the price paid for Saunders’s remains, Med Ed Labs charges an estimated $10,000 for a full cadaver. The lab sold Saunders’s body to Death Science, a company that normally makes its money providing “eCourses” on forensics and death investigation. Instead, she worked with a local funeral home, Church Funeral Services, to give the body to Med Ed Labs, a Las Vegas–based company that buys and sells human cadavers for medical and surgical education. How did this violence to David’s body come to pass? Elsie tried to donate his remains to Louisiana State University but was rejected because of his COVID-19 diagnosis. In truth, body donation today is a multifaceted enterprise that mixes altruism, the promise of science, and outright profiteering. I have all this paperwork that says his body would be used for science – nothing about this commercialization of his death.” Her words reflect an assumption that many Americans likely hold: the use of human cadavers for scientific purposes is noble, but any hint of commerce renders the practice dirty. His wife Elsie told one reporter, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s horrible, unethical, and I just don’t have the words to describe it. When news of the event reached the Saunders family, they were shocked. Nearly two months later, on October 17, he was publicly dissected in front of hundreds of spectators in a Marriott hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. On August 24, 2021, 98-year-old David Saunders died from COVID-19 at a hospital near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. ![]()
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