I kind of want to be made into a diamond.
Fertilizer.
Both of my parents arranged to donate their bodies to a medical school. My father passed away in 2015. The university collected his body from the hospital, although I think my mom had to pay for transport. I’m not sure. Anyway, this university has a service every year where some of the med students give talks about how important it was for them to have the opportunity to work on cadavers and how thankful they were to the families for allowing them to. One of the students said something to the effect of, the cadaver was her first patient. I thought that was nice. This university has a columbarium at a cemetery, with all the donors’ names engraved on a monument.
AIUI, you can’t do both organ donation and donate your body to a med school. I’ve always planned to have any usable organs donated, then have my body cremated. But I’m probably getting to the age where there won’t be a helluva lot of demand for my organs after I’m done abusing them, so maybe I should revisit my thinking on the topic.
body farm participate to help students study for crime scene investigation.
If you want to be worshipped, you can arrange for your ashes to become part of a Buddha statue.
That can’t be comforting to hear if you’re an obese person who nevertheless may need medical care one day. I would have assumed that from a medical scholar standpoint, the more variation the better.
Big or small. The Oregon Health Sciences link above indicates they won’t take anybody under 100 pounds or over 200 because of something with their prep procedure.
I imagine working with a 275-pound cadaver doesn’t teach a whole lot less than working on a 600-pound cadaver; either way, students will get the idea that there may be large amounts of adipose tissue in their way. Students intending to specialize in bariatric surgery can learn about working on extremely obese patients later on from experts in that field.
Well , no ??? its a bit like They might only get perfect scores on 10% of anatomy diagrams, they’d still get 80% on each diagram ??
The important lessons from anatomy is what each part is meant to look like and what it does… and the interconnections eg why would the kidney stones cause heart problems ?
timely thread.
I just toured our local Coroner’s office yesterday. That question came up. The Coroner has passed on several bodies to medical schools here and in neighboring states. If they know about the situation in advance they are quite cooperative.
Likewise with the organ donation folks. Those folks watch the same network the Coroner and Police use to keep each other informed about the status of cases. They swoop in whenever a likely candidate shows up on the net.
Interesting tour.
If you’re in the Atlanta area, consider gifting your carcass to the Emory University School of Medicine.
There’s a bit of paperwork and your next of kin need to sign off on it, but if you don’t believe in being planted and can meet their requirements it’s a good option. I had a friend who did this and when he died at home Emory picked up the body from the Medical Examiner’s office, easy peasy.
This.
And you ought to be willing to test new flamethrowers. How else will we learn how to keep people safe? I used to work with landmines. (Nasty things.) I would very much like my legs to be used to test new protective equipment.
I would imagine by the time a doctor is actually operating on me (as opposed to listening to my hear and breathing) they are a bit more up to date with the studies of what they are digging for than “Lemme see, 10 years ago in med school I think the thingy was just behind these ribs…”. I certainly hope when they are digging their finger in to check my prostate, they’ve at least done this often enough that anatomy class wasn’t the last time they did this. (Unless I’m in a teaching hospital, then it serves me right if there’s a lineup beside by bed…)
I would like for my remains to be used as a…
Bicycle rack.
Failing that…
Some form of archaeological experiment
I thought this thread was going to be about how to get my ashes into Brooke Shields’ shampoo bottle.
I would not assume that medical schools spend the large amounts of extra money needed to have equipment that can hold, move, and store people over 300 pounds in their training areas. You need larger sturdier tables to work on the body, larger and more reinforced drawers to store them when not in use, larger and more reinforced cranes/stretchers/etc to move them from storage to the table, larger and more reinforced facilities for preserving the body in the first place, and so on. You also may run into safety issues having students attempt to move a larger body, which would require hiring extra staff or risking significant liability.
Wife and I have everything legally arranged by an attorney and a mortician but the last time we checked, several months go, both the med schools and the ‘forensic body farms’ were overbooked. They had too many potential cadavers queued up. So I don’t know what happens if I were fortunate enough to croak today and no slot opens up.
I would like to have my corpse dropped into a tar pit so that archaeologists a few dozen million years in the future can study my perplexing bones.
This was a fairly lively, howbeit mature, thread until someone made some adolescent joke about…nm…
Maybe you’ll develop an interesting condition that needs study.
My FIL passed away earlier this year and his remains were donated to Huntington’s disease research. At some point whenever they finish doing whatever they’re doing with him they will cremate him and return the ashes to us.