I threw up in my mouth reading this:
Elsie Saunders told a reporter that her husband, “a World War II and Korean War veteran,” who died of COVID-19 in August, wanted to perform one more act of service, donating his body to “help advance medical science.”
That’s not what happened:
David Saunders’ body ended up in a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, where DeathScience.org held an “Oddities and Curiosities Expo.” At the October 17 event, members of the public sat ringside from 9 am to 4 pm—with a break for lunch—to watch David Saunders’ body be carefully dissected. Tickets for the dissection sold for up to $500 per person.
What is DeathScience? It appears to be a fairly thin-on-the-ground attempt to make a few quick bucks “disrupting” curiosity about death. On its website you can buy death “merch,” prepay for courses promised for 2022 to learn “death investigation” and the like. (I’m not sure I’d trust an education provider that offers a one paragraph pitch that ends “The information is taught with professionals…in the field that science.” Maybe I’m an old fart, but how hard is it to proofread less than 100 words?)
Also: soon, they promise, you could sign up for more events like the one in Portland where David Saunders was turned into entertainment.
There’s a hideous tech-bro vibe to the whole enterprise, and every individual involved in this grotesque mockery should suffer as much shame and opprobrium as we all can muster. IANAL and I have no idea if there’s anything actionable here, but I hope there is, and that Mrs. Saunders turns them all into paupers.
I guess I’m a little perturbed by this.
But for all that, the ghastly excuses for people directly involved in treating Mr. Saunders as an oddity are symptoms, not the problem itself.
Late stage capitalism is a social phenomenon. In a place and time when not only everything can be financialized, but it is seen by many as a moral imperative to do so, this is what you get. It seems particularly horrific because of how easy it is to see ourselves in David Saunders: lives we’ve led reduced to a few hours’ bread-and-circus in some chain hotel with a good formaldehyde supplier nearby.
But this is just an indicator of how much we’ve already lost to the idea that all of experience can (and, to many, should!) be financialized, that those who can, should dip their beaks into every shift and turn of daily life, including its end, siphoning off the money to be made by turning each such moment into a transaction.
This wasn’t an explicitly political act by the techbro ghouls. But it is a reflection of our politics, where one party uses all its considerable power to make the world safe for death tourists and every other financial engineer. Not the world I want to live in.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln.
Open thread, and, as an apology–a cat picture or two…
- Tikka shares my opinion of the miscreants in the story above:
2: Champ simply allows us to bask in her pure awesomeness:
Image: detail from Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Rocco in the hospital, 1549
jackmac
My God. How horrible a person do you have to be to even have an interest — much less attend — something like this.
Baud
I started reading and thought this was going to be about DeSantis.
Ken
I’m sure this will be one of those “the scandal is what’s legal” things.
Baud
There’s a famous art exhibit made up of dead people dissected up in ways that show different people facets of the human body. I assume all the bodies used for that were knowingly donated.
CaseyL
IANAL, but my impression is, once you “leave your body to science,” whichever institution or organization you leave it to can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Including, as may have happened in this case, sell the corpse to a for-profit company for…whatever.
@Baud: There were actually two of those, with the other one being a Chinese exhibition that may have included the bodies of political prisoners.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
If his mourning wife got two shiny nickels out of this whole shameful deal, it would floor me.
M31
“You have been judged, and found wanting”
—Tikka
dmsilev
@Baud: The ‘Body World’ exhibits?
Many of the bodies shown therein come from e.g. China, with …less than ironclad documentation that they are not, for instance, from condemned prisoners whose bodies were sold off without any consent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Worlds#Controversies
The Dangerman
The dark side of the Internet; at one time, it would have been basically impossible to find the, how can I put this appropriately, the sick fucks that would pay to watch this ugliness. Now, google something and off you go. I don’t blame the sellers as much as I blame the buyers. Sellers are responding to a demand that shouldn’t exist.
Cameron
@Baud: Christ! Don’t give him ideas! Can you imagine the show he’ll put on at the next CPAC?
Tom Levenson
@Baud: I found that pretty horrific too.
Suzanne
Christ almighty.
FelonyGovt
Very disturbing. Sounds like an event for would-be surgeons and ghouls.
The problem is, this kind of thing probably discourages donations which would actually advance science.
Baud
@dmsilev: i didn’t know about that. I wonder why. I bet they could have found enough volunteers.
Hilbertsubspace
Next week: Mimosas and Vivisection!
SiubhanDuinne
“Come one, come all — step right up!” It’s not just financializing a man’s death (although that’s grotesque enough), it’s a way of desensitizing the public to that death. Get enough people to consider human dissection as simple butchery, and before long you have a population that hears news of death camps and mass executions with equanimity.
I hope I’m not being too extreme here, but all these events seem to me to be all of a piece. What an exceedingly distressing — and necessary — post, Tom.
mrmoshpotato
Holy shit! I don’t know if P. T. Barnum would take his hat off to these ghoulish bastards or give them a punch in the kisser.
Cameron
@Hilbertsubspace: An Evening of Cocktails and Catastrophe, brought to you by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Or as must watch TV.
trollhattan
@dmsilev: On the Sketchy Scale® that one ranks an 11.
It toured my metroplex many years ago, my kid may have been eight or so at the time, and I pondered whether this was my best chance* to nail down the Worst Dad In the World crown by taking her.
*Best, arising from the realization that holy fuck, parents are taking their young kids to see this thing. “But honey, the human body is beautiful.” “So is sleep, mom, aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!”
Professor Bigfoot
It really does feel like, in America, if it’s profitable it is by definition moral.
Baud
I blame CSI.
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: Weren’t lynchings popular entertainment, in many cases? How many people watched the video of Daniel Pearl being butchered? There is nothing new.
la caterina
Thanks for the apology pics. Champ kitten is so big!
Jerzy Russian
Suggestion captions:
1. What did you do with my balls?
2. A cat on a kitchen table.
Starfish
@jackmac:
It’s okay to be interested in death and science, but $500 for a one- day circus is not really respectful of death and is not really science.
Mary Roach writes humorous books about science, and she wrote one called Stiff about the secret life of cadavers and how they are used. There was something about cadavers being used as crash test dummies in some cases.
With all the police shows with grotesque corpses like Bones and various others, a lot of people became interested in corpses, death, and police stuff.
However, some schools that have cadaver labs (like medical schools) are now doing a service for all the cadavers they use in a semester. In this way, they are honoring that these were people whose bodies were donated to science.
Archaeologists also do a cadaver lab.
There are legitimate science places for corpses.
The Boston Museum of Science hosts the Body World exhibit. This exhibit lives some place between science education and entertainment. These bodies are used as sculptures, and they show a video of the factory that preserves the bodies and how they do it. I think this was supposed to be the more ethical of these exhibits, but it is still a little creepy to me.
schrodingers_cat
Is late stage capitalism the new neoliberalism?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I had the same thought.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: GMTA.
lowtechcyclist
I’ve probably said this before, but IMHO it’s an almost direct result of the imbalance between the billions and billions of excess money in the hands of the ultra-rich, and what passes for the disposable income of everyone else.
The story that conservatives used to tell us was that the rich would invest their money to produce new goods and services for the rest of us to buy, and create lots of new jobs along the way.
The problem is, the potentially profitable investments in the normal range of goods and services is limited by how much the citizenry can afford to spend on said goods and services. And if those investments have all been made, and there’s still a shit-ton of money left over in the hands of the rich who are demanding a return on that money, what then?
The answer is, the investments get increasingly bizarre, because ‘normal’ has already been used up.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
We should donate our minds to science.
Almost Retired
So…..this post is an intersection of my present (a lawyer) and my past (the son of an undertaker who grew up in a funeral home). Yes, really.
Legally, it varies from state to state and at least in my state at the time, the regulations were pretty lax in exactly how “educational function” was defined. As a result, I vaguely recall my Dad counseling potential donors to impose contractual stipulations on how the body would be used. Although he could never had imagined this.
By the way, I had great Halloween parties in High School.
Sure Lurkalot
I was in a book club and a chosen book was Geek Love. From the best of my memory, it was about a family who administered drugs and radiation to cause birth defects so as to be circus freaks.
It was nominated for the National Book Award but I only remember being horrified.
NotMax
“That Einstein fella scienced pretty damn good.”
Eljai
Jeremy Ciliberto, the founder of Deathscience, also has a website for his art which includes “catacomb culture” bone art, and he has given a TEDx talk (why am I not the least bit surprised). Maybe Jeremy just fucked up, but this has grift written all over it.
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: It started as a critique of capitalism by the communists. It is how capitalism changes to something dysfunctional that is going to fall apart. Like if capitalism is a handful of billionaires and a few monopolies, that is the failure of late-stage capitalism.
A lot of the people who like to discuss late-stage capitalism are communists and possibly the tankies who are the worst of the communists.
But as we live in more unregulated capitalist dysfunction with a Congress being captured by corporate dollars, the term late-stage capitalism is finding much broader appeal than it once used to so it might become like neo-liberal in that way.
debbie
Champ is watching. Always watching.
Baud
@Starfish:
No offense to Tom, but that phrase has become trite with overuse (and misuse) IMHO.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Indeed. It has come to mean whatever the user of the phrase finds distasteful.
NotMax
Sidebar:
Singles night events were a thing at the now kaput Morbid Anatomy Museum.
Kay
@Almost Retired:
Lawyers were told a couple of years ago (in Ohio) that there were more than enough bodies being donated for medical schools and that relatives of the deceased shouldn’t rely on having the donation accepted.
But obviously they shouldn’t be tricked or have the donation sold.
Almost Retired
@Kay: absolutely. This was 40 years ago, when they still needed donations.
UncleEbeneezer
@Starfish: Carl Zimmer’s excellent Soul Made Flesh about the discovery of the human brain, had alot of corpse/autopsy stuff in it and was really fascinating.
Starfish
@Sure Lurkalot: I remember enjoying that book. It was humorous. I think that the book was told from the perspective of one of the circus freaks was interesting.
I read this in 2008 and went back to see if I wrote anything about it at the time.
While many books are written alternating from the perspective of different characters, this one was set up alternating between three different timelines.
Starfish
@Baud: Spoken like a true late-stage capitalist. ??
Baud
@Starfish:
You can attend my TedTalks for a mere $500.
Starfish
@UncleEbeneezer: Thank you. I added that to the list.
Tom Levenson
@Baud: Tough room.
Old Man Shadow
Humans are resources. Cogs in the soulless machine of wealth generation. Nothing more. No truth. No art. No beauty. Nothing sacred. Just money. Grind away until you die and after that we’ll still find a way to profit from your exploitation.
Our culture is sickening.
Starfish
@Baud: Think bigger. Someone was saying that either their Tesla or their Tesla app was not updating properly for daylight savings time. I told him that we could offer to fix it for Elon for one billion dollars.
Baud
@Starfish:
Oh geez. I would immediately lose confidence in the car.
NotMax
@Baud
Am taken aback that you don’t accept Baudcoin.
:)
FridayNext
@mrmoshpotato:
Well, since you mentioned it.
[Dusts off dissertation looking for a footnote]
Barnum been there, done that, and sold some t-shirts. When did it, he used an elderly slave woman named Joice Heth, whom he paraded around the country as George Washington’s governess. (She would have been over a hundred by then) When she died, he sold tickets to her autopsy. There was also a thriving business in mid-to-late 19th century for Anatomical Museums that had gruesome displays and demonstrations but also regularly had courses on “The Philosophy of Marriage” to which only adult men were admitted.
Citation: Reiss, Benjamin. 2010. The showman and the slave race, death, and memory in Barnum’s America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Also this book has a wonderful consideration of the episode in the context of 19th century fascination with hoaxes and humbugs.
Goodman, Matthew. 2008. The Sun and the moon: the remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats in nineteenth-century New York. New York: Basic Books. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10392035.
Ken
There already is a series called something like “Celebrity Autopsy”. They don’t show an actual autopsy, but they go into detail about the findings about how the person died, and what led to their death.
Starfish
@NotMax: Baud only accepts Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.
Almost Retired
@Old Man Shadow: Exactly. I always thought the term “Human Resources” was way too accurate in describing a corporation’s view of employees. Which is why the term is being replaced by bullshit euphemisms…”People Power Department,” and crap like that.
ETtheLibrarian
Tikka”s face needs to be on a t-shirt with a “go away” underneath
Ruckus
Late stage capitalism – If you can’t make a buck legitimately, any way possible is OK. So really any concept of making money.
People used to gather to see hangings, quite often they were racist hangings but I’m sure someone made a buck or two at it.
People used to travel town to town to sell fake medical cures, surely you’ve heard of snake oil salesmen. People used to go door to door to sell vacuum cleaners, some of them actually worked… Not all that long ago you could open an office as a doctor, there was little to no way to know if the person knew squat about medicine. Pharmacies existed that were nothing more than selling chemicals of unknown origin and with no concept of safety or efficacy.
We still pay to see a sport in which people effectively beat each other up and end up with major medical problems for the rest of their lives – football. I know 2 men who played pro football, one with a Superbowl ring, they both have massive health issues way ahead of their ages. They somewhat think it’s worth it, I’m not sure. I also worked in professional sports and have visited competitors in the hospital, it was part of the job. And not the best part. Actually not the worst part either.
As long as there has been money there has been people willing to do anything to get some. The mob killed/kills for money. The reasons people pay for things that quite possibly they shouldn’t should come as no surprise to those that observe the conservative side of politics.
jonas
I dunno — is this any worse than the people who donate their bodies to be plastinated and put on display in the “Bodyworlds” exhibitions?
chrome agnomen
@Ruckus: we really haven’t ventured far from the cave, have we?
FridayNext
@jonas:
As commenters mentioned earlier there is good reason to believe that neither those people nor their families consented to their bodies being used that way.
The line between moral and immoral is often divided by the important concept of “consent.”
NotMax
Ruckus
Kirby, sold that way, cranked out a darn good and robust machine.
Kay
@jonas:
She’ll find out what happened. It has to be donated, accepted and then delivered. Somewhere in there someone passed it off without her consent.
Starfish
@Ruckus:
People sold postcards of the lynchings. Those postcards are in circulation until this day. People were trying to sell various racist things on eBay, but apparently one dude was not allowed to sell his lynching postcard there.
in addition to that, people would take pieces of the corpses and try to sell those too.
debbie
@Baud:
Trite, maybe, but accurate.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Most brands were sold that way. And yes Kirby was a good brand. Many were not. But then a lot of things made and sold over the decades/centuries have been, let’s be nice now, crap. Many have not been so described.
Gvg
I am not sure this is really just capitalism. Lynching, witchcraft burnings, weird cults”….I think it’s just some people are always degenerates in every society. Today doesn’t strike me as exceptionally bad compared to most of history. Which doesn’t mean the degenerates shouldn’t be punished.
Also we are in another gilded age and need to trim the rich to not harm the rest of us so much but that is true anyway, not because of this story in particular.
when I had cancer, it was a fairly rare one and they wanted to share my records for research. I consented of course, but most illnesses and most pretty healthy people don’t need to donate to science. Routine autopsies don’t reveal much new knowledge.
JWR
Is this just an update on the old “Faces of Death” movies, which purported to show actual death scenes? (Which I read were not actual killings.) But it’s not too hard to see how a certain subset of the population would be “intrigued” by this bit of grotesquery. Also, I know that you can leave your mortal coil to a specified field of science, such as to the folks who study what happens to a body when dumped in a field and left to rot. (Sorry for the imagery, but I saw it on PBS!)
opiejeanne
@JWR: The Body Farm. They leave bodies on an island in different types of terrain: under a tree, half-buried, out in the open in a field, submerged or half-submerged.
The books that “Bones” was based on talked about it.
Ok, not an island. I misremembered.
eclare
@JWR: The Body Farm, part of UT’s department of forensic anthropology.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@Starfish: Sounds like the opposite of selling the supposed body parts of saints.
Omnes Omnibus
Public executions have always drawn crowds.
Ladyracterinok
@SiubhanDuinne:
Should we add the autopsies on NCIS and the examinations of bodies or what remains of them on the TV series Bones,?
Both series could be interpreted as showing human bodies as something that can be taken apart..
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@eclare: The Body Farm as gruesome as it sounds was truly a scientific endeavor and crucial to the advancement of death investigation. Without it we wouldn’t be able to determine the time of death as well as we do now. Not to mention location, cause, etc, etc.
eclare
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: I agree! I grew up in Knoxville, where UT is, so I heard about it from a young age.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
What thing humans do that doesn’t change over time, for the worse or for the better? How often has the change for the worse been for money, and how to get a lot more of it? It doesn’t matter the name of the money, metals, paper or electrons, it has a life of it’s own and it creates greed that someone has to pay for. Usually with something to do with life, possibly like the worsening of it, sometimes with dire results. What wars did not, when the reason for them became clear, involve monetary gain for someone(s)? Our civil war was absolutely a war about racism and slavery, but the rational was money. And no the racism has not gone away, because neither side made the war about racism, the basis of that cheap or free labor. At the end of the day it was about money and how money was made. This is a story that has repeated itself throughout history. The cost of the Civil War was racism and death. The rational was how money was made. Look at what is paid to work in many fast food places in CA, it’s $12-15/hr to start, and yet look who refuses to consider raising the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25/hr, the federal government. The only state with a minimum wage this low is Virginia. I make more on SS than I would with a 40 hr a week job at $7.25/hr..
JWR
@opiejeanne: & @eclare: “The Body Farm”, yes, that’s it. I enjoyed what I saw on PBS, but can’t imagine watching an autopsy just for the hell of it.
And when I started to read this post, I had the grand notion that they were gonna show the lungs to demonstrate what Covid actually does when left untreated, which might not be a bad idea.
opiejeanne
@Ladyracterinok: I don’t find CSI or Bones gruesome; the autopsies aren’t the most important part of the CSI episodes other than determining method of death. In HS we were shown a film of an open heart surgery, and it was fascinating.
I have only watched one NCIS episode and didn’t care for the show in general so I can’t speak for how bodies were treated.
ian
@Ruckus: Wyoming, where I live, has no minimum wage. The 7.25 is our minimum wage because of federal law. I can’t speak for other states, but I suspect it is true for more than just Virginia.
eclare
@JWR: The Dr. Gupta (not Sanjay) that works at a hospital in the state of Washington has been on MSNBC with x-rays of covid ravaged lungs.
Those x-rays should be everywhere, like years ago when they showed pictures of smokers’ lungs.
Jim Appleton
OT.
Those of us lucky to be familiar with Irving Finkel likely know him as curator of Assyrian and Babylonian writings at the British Museum.
Here is something distantly related and quite amazing.
A repository of handwritten diaries, recently formed and growing daily.
He makes an impassioned case for the importance of the collection. History documented as personal remembrance.
He also makes a good plug for further submissions — if someone has old diaries but doesn’t know what to do with them, now there’s a simple, permanent, and enriching solution.
I imagine BJ’ers will enjoy and possibly be moved.
VeniceRiley
Well. This makes me want to spork much own eyes out. Hey wait. I could sell an NFT for that!
eclare
@Ruckus: My wonderful (HA!) state of Tennessee doesn’t have a minimum wage, so it’s the same as federal.
opiejeanne
@JWR: Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist, created the main character of Bones, but the tv show is quite a bit different from the books. IIRC, I stopped reading her books because of the increasingly awful descriptions of the disposal of bodies and the conditions the main character has to deal with to retrieve them. Also, I think the author kept killing off Temperance Brennan’s boyfriends, but that may have been another author’s books.
MemoryWasTheFirst
Sometimes I wonder if perhaps some of this dark macabre fascination with death and dead bodies (and its obverse side, an illogical disavowal of mortality in a pandemic, as seen among the among the antivaxers) has to do with modern society’s estrangement from death and the dead.
Very few in the US now die in childhood. Dead children were common even just 100 years ago. And for adults too in the last half of the 20th century death is far less likely. The actuarial money is betting most of us live into our 8th decade.
”Covid-19 only kills 0.01%”. Or some such statistic the anti-vaxers like to glibly say.
I wonder if they would be so glib if half their siblings had died before adulthood, if their mother died giving birth to one of them, or if death by disease even in the prime of life were as commonplace as it once was.
Maybe some of these voyeurs might not find it so titillating if they knew all too well what death wears under its kilt.
Another Scott
My dad died of a fairly rare cancer (uveal melanoma). He was thinking about donating his body “to science” so that they might figure out more about how to diagnose it faster and develop treatments. But, on looking into the process a little more, he decided not to (he was told that his remains probably wouldn’t be very helpful for that purpose anyway, so they’d probably be used elsewhere).
Cheers,
Scott.
Kayla Rudbek
@Ruckus: with respect to Virginia, as Mr. Rudbek reminded me this weekend, we bicycle right by a place where they used to sell human beings (Old Town Alexandria Virginia – now a Black History museum). We’re in a mixed marriage (he’s Southern raised and I’m a proud Minnesotan going back to the territorial census on one of the branches of my family tree).
And I saw a mailing from the county in the mail stack today about changing the name of US 50 from Lee-Jackson Highway. I don’t know if they have an option for “hell yes, it never should have been named for those bastards in the first place” as a response option.
Platonicspoof
I don’t know if there were any takers, but I have to wonder what you could put, or not put, on the menu.
Ruckus
@ian:
Likely true but many states have a far higher minimum than the federal $7.25. $7.25/hr for a 40 hr week at 52 weeks = $15,080. Can anyone here live on that? We have 700-800 billionaires living in the US, many of whom pay far less than 10% income tax. Several are worth well in excess of $50 billion, a number are worth over $100 billion. And we can’t raise the minimum wage to a living amount because why? I’d bet a minimum living wage in VA is a bit above $15,080. Possibly quite a bit.
Another Scott
@Kayla Rudbek: I got the card in the mail, too. Thanks for the reminder.
Confederate Names Task Force (deadline is November 12)
Cheers,
Scott.
Timill
@Platonicspoof: Fava beans and a nice Chianti, of course…
Kayla Rudbek
@Another Scott: George Thomas as one of the names is my immediate suggestion. Grant-Sherman Highway, maybe? This would be a great project for the Angry Staff Officer on Twitter…
Ruckus
@eclare:
@ian:
I’d bet there are other states that only follow the federal minimum wage but that is another reason to absolutely raise the federal limit. But that seems to be too much for some people who make over 11 times that as members of congress.
JWR
@eclare: “Those x-rays should be everywhere”
Now that’s what I’m talking about! “Covid lungs: The Leathering”. And maybe display the intestines of a person who killed themselves by eating horse paste.
@opiejeanne: I’ve never seen the TV show “Bones”. Actually, one thing I tend to avoid on (broadcast) TV is any show made after maybe the early 1970’s, (with the possible exception of “Married… with Children”, when it’s available), and am unfamiliar with all the shows all y’all’s talk about ‘roun’ these parts. Guess I’m just not a ‘new show’ kinda guy. ;)
JoyceH
@Another Scott:
Route 1 is still Jefferson Davis Highway. Not just Davis Highway, but always pronounced Jefferson Davis Highway, to make sure we get it.
SFBayAreaGal
@Baud: Before CSI, there was Quincy, M.E. I blame Quincy.
ian
@Ruckus: No disagreement here. I merely pointed it out in response to the statement
NotMax
@Platonicspoof
Mortadella with a side of blood pudding?
eclare
@ian: Same here. I would bet a lot of southern states don’t have a min wage above federal.
JWR
@Ruckus: Have you seen the um, ruckus, local TV news has been raising about West Hollywood raising it’s minimum to something like $17+ by 2023? (Egads! Highest in the country!) I really wish they would point out that $17/hr is still less than anyone can live on. (Actually, one station, I forget which one, interviewed one person who pointed this out.) But just as with the new city and county Covid mandates coming into play, it’s all they can do to find people bitching about one or the other, despite reporting that most people agree with both.
Ohio Mom
That’s a disappointment, that Ohio medical schools have enough bodies for the anatomy labs. That’s what I’ve been thinking of doing (eventually) — it’s the cheapskate way around burial expenses.
The other scientific uses for bodies don’t appeal to me for reasons I can’t figure out. I’m pretty certain that when Ohio Dad had his new heart valve put in, cadaver torsos were what the surgeons practiced on first. And I’m glad that option exists so medical devices and techniques can be perfected (or at least made better).
But the idea of being parceled out into various pieces for various purposes, no matter how important, makes me flinch.
Maybe I’ll grow into that though. I am assuming I have a while yet for that sort of decision.
Ruckus
@JWR:
I’d bet living in NYC is damn near impossible at $17/hr unless a lot of overtime is involved. It is basically impossible for most people to live in most any big city with one $15/hr wage earner. That’s $31,200 for 40hrs/52wk job. Gross, after tax likely around $25K, depending on state taxes.
PJ
@Baud: They were said to be the bodies of Chinese prisoners.
prostratedragon
@lowtechcyclist: This is a good point, to which I would add that the normal range of goods is of a lower order (not a true subset) of the desirable range of goods, with some of the omissions being things that few of these super wealthy people would contribute to, like a great many public goods. Or, the absorbtive capacity of the larger public could be increased by higher minimum wage and other wages, basic income, and the like, thus relieving the super wealthy of some of the burden of their disposable incomes.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@dmsilev: Here is an excellent and nuanced video of the entire Body World “Thing”. Plus she is my go-to for all things that are really death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID7M4k_k3-Q
prostratedragon
@Starfish: A family friend knew it was time for him to leave their Mississippi town when a jovial white man showed him a matchbox containing a set of brown fingers. I hope Mrs. Saunders sues the relevant parties and wins.
“Vein Melter,” Herbie Hancock
James E Powell
@eclare:
Which did not stop people from smoking.
gene108
From the Death Science website
I guess they’ve given up trying to do human autopsies.
About the event:
Death Science and Med Ed canceled their contract and no longer do business with each other.
Mrs. Saunders donated her husband’s body to a company that probably sells corpses to medical schools, so she thought Mr. Saunders body would go train the next generation of doctors.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/public-dissection-of-donated-body-in-oregon-was-educational-company-says/
prostratedragon
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: I seem to recall that it was a director of that place who provided invaluable training and assistance in places like Uganda and Argentina, identifying victims dirty wars. Context and method mean a lot here.
JWR
@Ruckus:
Exactly. And while it’s really nice to see minimum wage coverage rise to a level we haven’t seen in years, it’s frustrating that these “huge” increases aren’t being portrayed as absolutely necessary for one person to rent a house or apartment, let alone eat or pay the bills. Heck, back in the early 1970’s, my older sister rented an apartment over a two car garage and bought a ’66 Mustang, all while working for freaking minimum wage at KFC! (In Northeast L.A. Highland Park, to be exact.)
gene108
@eclare:
AL, LA, SC, and TN don’t have a minimum wage. Any business subject to FLSA has to pay the federal minimum wage.
If you’re a small business with no interstate commerce, you can pay employees as little as you want. Though I’m not sure how a business can avoid interstate commerce in this day and age, as anything you’d need to run a business from paper to lightbulbs involves some level of interstate commerce.
BQuimby
I knew he would have a punchable face!!!
https://images.app.goo.gl/m8HW29XT8o6zp8Yw8
lowtechcyclist
@JWR:
This. Back in the late 1970s, my more liberal officemate and I (I was still a moderate Republican back then) used to debate just what a minimum wage should accomplish. He thought it should be able to support a family of four; my more conservative stance was that a minimum wage worker should be able to support him/herself and one dependent.
But my point is, at least that was what we were debating. And that’s what the debate really needs to be about right now. Once that’s been decided, the dollar figure of the minimum wage can be set to make that happen. Hell, once it’s been decided what the minimum wage should support, delegate the setting of the actual rate to the Department of Labor, or HHS, or whoever.
Alce_e_ardillo
Ages ago, when I was training to be a physician assistant, we had our gross anatomy course, which was with cadavers, the very same that was Mr. Saunders once. The one requirement that we could not skip out on was the memorial service at the end for the persons who donated their bodies for us to learn the human body. To remind us that these were once living, loving, breathing people.
Jim Appleton
@Ruckus: Agreed.
What should NYC’s minimum wage be?
Let’s arbitrarily double 17/hr.
Then make it a national standard.
If picking lettuce paid 62k, we might have gringos competing for those jobs.
km
The way cadavers are treated, including by med schools, has always creeped me out.
Tikka’s eyes are amazing.