Almost every Biology or Anthropology classroom I’ve ever been in (in either high school or college) seems to have a human skelleton hanging on a rack in the corner. Every time I asked a teacher where they come from I got a similar story:
“They all come from India where it is cutomary for villagers to toss their dead kin into the Ganges. Down river there are folks who recover the bodies and sell them to scientific supply houses in the West.”
True? What are the details of this industry? Who gets the job of stripping and cleaning the bones and wiring them together? Are the bone marked in any way to keep them from being mistaken for murder vitims? Can just anybody buy a human skelleton?
Not quite plastic, I believe, but some kind of resin I think? In my university I asked a biology teacher about buying a cranium (or a skeleton) to adorn my mantlepiece (remember, I was still in college) and I was told that real skeletons are quite expensive.
You can see that even the “cast” skeletons (cast from what? it doesn’t say) are in the hundreds of dollars. I doubt a high school in the USA could afford a real human skeleton.
Whoops! My mistake! The site above does say how the skeletons are made.[ul][li]Chromoplated flex tube for superflexibility.[/li][li]Impact& fatigue-proof polyurethane.[/li][li]Stainless steel hardware.[/li][li]Durable, soft polyurethane rubber muscles attached with strong flexible bundge cord for dynamic banding & stretching demonstrations.[/li]Cast from natural bones[/ul]
The article is very interesting. They mention the high value of bones (e.g. femur - US$3,310; tibia US$5,515; etc…) and their use. Demineralized bone is used by dentists to treat gum disease. Some “machined” parts, such as threaded bone dowels, are used in spinal-fusion surgery. Grafton (human-bone paste) is used to seal bone fractures.
When I worked at the local med school, my office was right next door to the morgue and gross anatomy lab. I frequently saw notices on the bulletin board about assignments for cadavers and ‘bone boxes.’ One student told me that, along with the body that a med student spends his semester dissecting, students are assigned a box of human bones. That leads me to believe that at least some of the bones of donated cadavers are kept to benefit future medical students.
Not that that answers the question about standing skeletons, but it is another kind of ‘human bones in the classroom’. And, quite frankly, I find the idea of a bone box a shade creepier than an assembled skeleton…