Some people request that their bodies be “left to science” after they die. I have come to understand this to mean that the body is used in medical schools to be dissected by anatomy students. Are there other uses of bodies “left to science”?
At least one person, a prisoner I think, had his body frozen then ground away a thin layer at a time to make a complete 3-D map of the interior.
Well, there is the Cadaver museum in Florida.
For the most part, other than organ retrieval, Med schools are the only places that use them.
Occasionally, a person may have a rare condition, that post mortem study might benefit others, but that’s just an autopsy.
Some doctosr may save a single diseased organ as an example of some rare condition.
The junior college my son went to, had serial fetuses in formalin to demonstrate development.
Another destination is the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The real name of the facility is the Forensic Anthropology Center, which became known around the world by its popular name because of the book by Patricia Cornwell.
This is a link to that project. It’s called the “Visible Human” project, and it’s pretty darn cool.
There’s the Body Farm, or the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility to give it its official title, where bodies are left in various conditions to study their decomposition. They accept body donations, and according to the wikipedia article, more than 300 people have donated.
Read Mary Roach’s excellent book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. She discusses the Body Farm, surgical practice on human heads, and that sort of thing. She’s obviously squeamish much of the time, but her book is an interesting discussion.
Robin
At the very least, if you plan to do this, you should pick the institution well in advance and discuss it with them and every member of your immediate family, as well as putting it in detailed writing in your will. No point bequeathing a hassle to your family.
You know, I think I’ve heard of that somewhere. Where was it now? I’m sure it will come to me, especially if I scan the thread and read, oh, post number four.
Just joking. It’s just that sometimes my posts seem to be invisible.
Insert the standard verbage in your will that you donate your body to (X) for any ‘therapeutic, instructional or investigative use.’ Make sure you tell your family.
In the US, it is standard practice that the university (or whatever) will chop you up and let hand doctors practice on your hands, nose doctors on your head, proctologists you don’t want to think about. Other parts will go to other institutions that studying the toenails of fat white guys or whatever.
Why cut you up, to get the most use out of your very valuable donation. If you are lucky maybe some of your parts will be good enough and fresh enough when harvested that they will save lives (or sight) directly through transplantation.
Then, after about a year, they gather up the parts and cremate them and return the cremains to you family.
Some bodies are used up completely by research, or used in exciting stuff like land mine studies or somesuch. Most bodies are used in routine and mundane ways.
Gruesome? Maybe. But each body donated saves lives by reducing surgical errors, finding new techniques or improving equipment. Everyone who donates is a hero in my book.
If you want more information pick up the book ‘Stiff, the secret lives of corpses.’
Oh, the guy who was cut into thin slices was not a convict. He died from lack of oxygen while cleaning the inside of a tank. A healthy dead young guy with no injuries. Very, very valuable and rare. He was not ground down. They did it with an MRI.
There was a cool documentary on the Body Farm on TV once, they actually showed time-lapse of a human body decomposing.
I realise you’re joking, but I think your post wasn’t there when I started writing my post.
silverfish, thank you! You just proved that my posts aren’t really invisible.
Did somebody say something?
For example, here (http://www.med.umn.edu/bequest/generalinfo/home.html) is the University of Minnesota webpage about donating your body to them.
I imagine most Universities with Medical Schools will have something similar available online.
When my parents died many years ago (1965) there was a group called Demonstrators or Demonstrators Anonymous. Because my parents both wanted their bodies to be used for medical science, I contacted these groups and they handled the arrangements so that their wishes could be honored. I believe there are still clearning houses, so to speak, that work like that on behalf of medical schools.
On a related note, I went to the “Body Farm” site, noted above. One thing that caught my eye was this:
This got me to thinking about the recent reconstruction of King Tut’s remains, which in turn raised this question which has been bugging me for years:
Whenever I see a face reconstructed from a skull, it always seems to be a case where the person’s true physiognomy is unknown. Has anybody/any lab ever done a blind experiment where they are given a skull of a person of known visage to reconstruct (the identity of whom they are not told) , and then compared the reconstruction with what the person actually looked like?
Duke doesn’t want me if I wind up donating any body parts, excepting my corneas, so I take it they plan to use the whole corpse for gross anatomy class.
Is it sick that I’m not worried about the fact that I’ll be dead so much as the fact that I might still be fat when I’m dissected? Eternal oblivion: no problem. Strangers seeing my cellulite: panic!
Anyway, what I would really love is to be part of Body Worlds, or better yet, have my skull used inside a ballistics gel mold of Adam’s head on *Mythbusters * to test some decapitation myth. I think that counts as science!
Well, I recall hearing about various cases where this happened.
A forensic scientist reconstructed a face from an unidentified skull, and pictures of that face were circulated. And promptly recognized by relatives of a missing person, who contacted the police. The skull was then verified via dental records, and they were then able to eventually identify & prosecute a murderer.
I’d say that wa a blind experiment – the scientist had no idea whose face he was producing, yet the result was close enough to be easily recognized by family members.
Back in my anthropology days we were told is was the “Anthropology Research Center” or “ARF.” Cute enough for such a place, but then the researchers there named it after Bill Bass (the prof that started it) and came up with “Bass’ Anthropological Research Facility.”