If Cecil lives in Illinois, and I suspect he might, what with him being an employee of the Chicago Reader, he may need to do more than just sign the back of his driver’s license. This page seems to suggest that you need to sign up on-line at Illinois’ donor registry website, www.lifegoeson.com, to make sure your wishes aren’t overridden by grieving family members. I encourage all Illinois Dopers, if you haven’t already done so, to do the same.
[Sad, and somewhat horrifying, story]
This very thing happened to my stepdad’s brother. He fell over dead of a massive heart attack. Well anyway, he had signed his driver’s license, yada yada yada. But at the hospital his parents insisted that his body needed to stay intact. They belong to some denomination that teaches that you need an intact and “whole” body when you go to Heaven. Since they were next of kin, they were allowed to overrule, and his organs wound up not being donated.
There Ia Also A Document Referred To As An Advance Directive Which Gives You
The Power To Donate Any Of Your Body Which You Desire To Donate. The Copy Of The Advanced Directive Is Given To Your Internist, Caridologist, Attorney,
And Next Of Kin. It Can Be Provided By Any Hospital That You Are Close To And
Needs To Be Placed On File. In Case Where You Are Not Able To Vocalize Your Last Needs This Is A Great Necessity. Signed Ms. Australopithecus
After having finished my first year of medical school, I can very well attest to having learned my share of anatomy from a cadaver. It’s an interesting world “in there”, once you get to see what a human being is made up of. We dissected the entire body, head to toe. Each team gave a name to their cadaver, and there was a memorial ceremony at the end of the course where we thanked these anonymous donors for letting us learn from them. I had never heard that some schools reject cadavers due to obesity so, if this is true, then my school isn’t one of them. We had an extremely overweight lady on our table, which made it much harder to dissect than the thinner bodies. Although there is more cutting involved, she did old up to the cold and dehydration much better than the thinner cadavers. In all, I feel honored to have been allowed to practice on her and the other cadavers. It is an unforgettable experience.
I’m not sure if this is true in all medical school’s human anatomy courses, but in mine the cadaver’s head and hands were covered with cloth wrapping at the beginning of the course to help us depersonalize it somewhat and give us time to adjust to the experience. My class thought it strange - head, yes; but hands? - until it came time to unwrap them. We were all struck by how uniquely “human” hands are, and how much personality they convey.
To this day I still pay a lot of attention to peoples hands.
Cecil, this part provides grist for a whole 'nother column, as well as a Great Debates topic:
I urge you and all who are interested on who profits from organ “donation” to read this five part exposé originally published in the Orange County Register in 1999:
It would be immoral to sell my remains after I die, but considering I have spent 51 years “processing” this body so far, I think it is only fair for these companies to pay my heirs a “processing” fee as well.
Yeah, I think it is really dumb to try to resist the forces of the market, as people are so want of doing in relation to body donations and transplants. Firstly, it’ll never work, as has been made clear. Second, I do not understand why we even feel this is a topic for ethics. What’s so wrong if people have a financial incentive to donate their carcasses? Hell, I also don’t understand what would be wrong if people had a financial incentive to donate their kidneys, blood, or marrow. People say that it would mean that the burden would be placed on poor people. UGH. Don’t they ever think that perhaps the poor ought be allowed to make their own choices, and that they may honestly benefit from the money more than from the kidney?? (especially if they’re also granted insurance in case of future failure.) This is just a sickening case of rich people doing stuff that does nothing more than make them feel better about themselves by trying to outlaw the more overt symptoms of the bane of poverty… like forcing the homeless into shelters and thinking they’re just doing them a favor.
(ugh. lately i’ve been saying stuff that sounds good but is hardly as objective as I am capable of. poverty in this age is usually nothing more than a superficial absence of displays of wealth, and hiding the symptoms is actually a bit the same as treating the illness. of course, to be fair we should be outlawing the behaviors of the rich as well.)
Two thoughts, Mr. Dubinsky:
First, do you really want market forces determining what happens to bodies after the owner dies? Keep in mind that the owner isn’t there to object any more, so one can imagine that a corpse, having a significant value, would often be sold into the trade in fradulent ways.
Second, if a body acquires a value in this way, how far away are we from a society where the body doesn’t necessarily end up a corpse willingly or without intervention from those with a financial interest? Mr. Niven’s works, if nothing else, should have made clear for us the ethical difficulties that face a society that places a value upon dead body parts.
Right. There’s nothing wrong with a person having a financial incentive to donate his or her own carcass. There is something wrong with a person having a financial incentive to donate someone else’s carcass. If you have in mind a system which would facilitate the one but not the other, let’s hear it.
Um, by setting up a legal market you actually reduce such abuses.
You seem to misunderstand the point that by letting people sell their bodies, you greatly increase supply and presumably hold demand steady. (That last point hinges on how well current laws keep the trade and demand at bay… and the message of the column seems to be that they do not). Therefore the price will go down, which means there would be instead less incentive to steal bodies or kill people.
The value is already there, and there is nothing you can do to change it. Market forces are nearly indistructable. Don’t you think that the money should rather go to the people who actually contribute their bodies, rather than to those who end up getting them for free on false pretenses?
Setting up a legal market does absolutely nothing to reduce the potential for the abuses I raised as a possibility. We have legal markets for a considerable number of products that are nevertheless sold fraudulently with regularity. Which doesn’t even get into the fact that most such “fraud” is done legally, by allowing the people who are doing the marketing to control the rules under which the marketing is allowed.
Further, making things cheap does not in any way make a market less lucrative, either for business in general (see: Wal-Mart) or for organized crime in particular (see: well, any number of things that they have had their hands in over the last 100 years, including such wonderfully unlucrative things as garbage). What legalizing the trade DOES do is enable those who wish to make illegal profits to do so with much less worry about being “caught” because their illegal activities have to be distinguished from the virtually identical legal version of the activity.
Who cares if the body has value already? Should we legalize illicit drugs on the basis that they have a value regardless, so we should see to it that the coca leaf growers get to pull down the true value of their product? Should we end copyright restrictions on the basis that people will try to make money off of illegal copies anyway? That argument is never a valid criticism of the decision to outlaw an activity. God forbid that market value and market forces become the only consideration in deciding what behaviour is “ethical” or legal.