Let the Dead Teach the Living: The Rise of Body Bequeathal in 20th-Century America

Abstract

America's medical schools have long used human cadavers to teach anatomy, but acquiring adequate numbers of bodies for dissection has always been a challenge. Physicians and medical students of the 18th and 19th centuries often resorted to robbing graves, and this history has been extensively examined. Less studied, however, is the history of body acquisition in the 20th century, and this article evaluates the factors that coalesced to transition American society from body theft to body donation. First, it describes the legislation that released the unclaimed bodies of those dying in public institutions to medical schools for dissection, thereby effectively ending grave robbery. Then it discusses midcentury journalistic exposés of excesses in the funeral industry-works that were instrumental in bringing alternatives, including the previously unpopular option of body donation, to public consciousness. Finally, it examines the rise of body transplantation, the Uniform Anatomical Gifts Act of 1968, and the subsequent state of willed-body programs at the turn of the 21st century. Body-donation programs have gradually stabilized since and currently provide most of the bodies used for dissection in American medical schools. Relying as they do on public trust, however, these programs remain potentially precarious and threatened by public scandals. Whether American medical schools will receive enough bodies to properly educate students in the future remains to be seen.

Hermann Stieve's clinical‐anatomical research on executed women during the “Third Reich”

“…We live in a very different world, in which the bodies of executed prisoners are no longer a common source of anatomical cadavers but rather a controversial exception (Hildebrandt, 2008). We are now accustomed to body donation programs, which only began to be established in the 1960s and 1970s (Jones, 2000;Garment, 2007;Kleinke, 2007). Moreover, we may not be able to imagine what it was like to live through a world war and under a totalitarian regime.…”

All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo’s Political Unrest

“…However, executed criminals did not provide an adequate supply for medical students, who turned to grave robbers to obtain cadavers, usually those of the destitute (Germent et al 2007;Lock 2002;Richardson 2000;Sappol 2002;Shultz 1992;). Further, medical schools most benefited from newly dead bodies.…”

“…Most were the bodies of the poor whose families could not afford funerary services (Germent et al 2007; Richardson 2006). The attitudes voiced at the time were that the poor had burdened wider society, and should therefore benefit society in their death, "transfer[ring] the punishment from murder to poverty" (Richardson 2006:163).…”

“…New social welfare provisions also meant that people lived longer and better lives, and thus, even when the state stopped subsidizing funerary costs, fewer 'unclaimed bodies' (of the poor) were available for medical use (Germent et al 2007). Thus, after a longer history of relying on the bodies of the destitute, both countries faced a shortage of medical cadavers.…”

Twenty-four years after liver transplantation, the recipient becomes a body donor

“…Moreover, organ donation and body donation face the same problem: the need is significantly greater than the availability. 3,4 Here we report for the first time the case of a long-term survivor of liver transplantation who donated her body for education and research to give something back for the extra years of life that were given to her by transplantation.…”