Those are used, IIRC, in the movie version of Gorky Park by a Soviet forensic pathologist to get the flesh off a human skeleton found at a crime scene.
And consider the curious posthumous existence of British philospher Jeremy Bentham: Jeremy Bentham - Wikipedia
As a Doper, you must … must rig the tasteful glass case to blow people’s minds. You must make sure your skull is mounted with a big smile, then have your hand arranged like a gun so that when people lean over and look, you’ll be saying “Gotcha Ya”.
Have you ever seen a frowning skull?
I’ll have mine winking.
It will surprise you how easy it is to get the Hamlet treatment. Simply place said severed head into a pot of water, and let boil for 4 to 5 days. You’ll be left with a cauldron of rather putrid soup, and a mostly defleshed skull (for this reason it’s advisable to change the water a few times). Simply remove remaining vertebrae, and shake the liquid brains from the hole in the base of the skull. Then let your skull sit in a vat of bleach for an additional 4 to 5 days, and finally perch it in direct sunlight to dry it out.
The above is the procedure for poor-mans trophifying of his deer spoils.
I very badly want my skull to have a role in a stage production of “Reefer Madness: The Musical.” There’s got to be some way you could work a skull in.
Almost all natural history museums, IIRC, use flesh-eating beetles.
That also seems more thrifty, quicker, and less gross than your method. But YMMV.
The beetles are one of the last steps, just before bleaching I believe. Their intended to get the little bits that are left over from earlier stages.
Has the OP been answered? I think we have been sidetracked with the means to skeletonize and forgotten about the main point which was the legal side of it.
That subject is covered in Stiff, the book I linked to above. I don’t have a copy of it here, so I can’t check.
I do remember being disappointed that it wouldn’t be feasible for me to end up hanging in a classroom after I died. I believe that there were some legal impediments to that, but I don’t remember the details.
What’s the usual source of cadaver for medical school? Aren’t they unclaimed corpses and donation made through last wish and testament? It shouldn’t be that hard for someone to volunteer as long as you don’t have very specific plans on where you want to end up. The OP’s wish of ending on the living room of some unsuspecting relative might be harder since it is not for the sake of science.
No, but I’ve seen the Grateful Dead a few hundred times 