Looking at state law in general, is it legal to possess or display a cadaver
in your home ?
Need answer fast?
The sense I get from this article is that the laws for how to treat a recently deceased cadaver are stricter than what is allowed for cadavers that are already in the free domain. And for parts/specimens, it’s pretty much anything goes. It would be my guess that you need some kind of license to actually preserve the body yourself, but that once the body was treated, you could own and display it as long as it was not in an irreverent way.
In 1982 the rugby team at the University of Pittsburgh attempted to intimidate their opponents by kicking human skulls onto the field during their entrance.. I was a student at the time and there was a kerfluffle, including criminal charges.
Only if it’s your own.
Acquiring a cadaver could be challenging. (youtube clip, SFW, but check your volume)
And before you go about acquiring cadavers and making midnight brain depository withdrawals, you might want to consider this:
"It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there’s the weather for you. For every mad scientist who’s had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime." from Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett.
There’s a criminal charge in Canada of “Indignity to a Dead Body”, usually applied to people who dump their victim into a dumpster or something.
I’d be surprised if there is not a similar charge in most states.
I know my friend who went to medical school was given very strict instructions on how to "treat the skeleton pieces (I.e. a threaded-together set of hand bones) that they were allowed to take home (temporarily) for study.
They had pet names for their disection cadavers, which were acquired from bodies that were donated to science". But these were never allowed out of the disection room, and obviously any joke photos or other indignities were a sure ticket to ex-med-student. (of course, my friends went to med school before cell phones)
Obviously, considering there’s a “Bodies” Exhibit and a Chinese knock-off that have toured North America for a decade or so - so exhibition per se is not illegal. The Chinese exhibit was at the South Street Seaport in NYC for a while, IIRC. However, the bodies were acquired with permission (allegedly*) and the display was for “educational” purposes.
- There was an episode of some TV news show that tried to track down the Chinese donors. The implication was that Chinese ancestor respect would mean nobody would permit their relatives’ remains to be turned into circus exhibits. The innuendo was that the factory that advertised and sold plasticized human cadaver parts “for science purposes” was bribing local morgue officials to sell them bodies that the relatives did not agree to release.
I’ve always thought the sources of the corpses for the “Human Body” exhibits were Chinese prison facilities.