While sitting in metaphysics class one afternoon, I asked my philosophy professor if Frankenstein’s monster is really a monster if he is just the sum of other people’s parts. He gave no reply to this question, only laughed.
This memory struck me when I was thinking about a topic that is both interesting and very weird, and one that poses great ethical concern: nontransplant donation centers, also known as body brokers.
Surgeons, doctors, medical specialists and researchers require real human cadavers to practice on, because no silicon dummy, computer simulation or electronic mannequin can provide an adequate learning experience; they need real tissues, bones and organs.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, medical schools could not find enough cadavers, so they hired individuals to sneak into cemeteries, dig up the corpses buried there, load them onto carts, conceal them and smuggle the carts back to the medical schools under cover of darkness. This practice earned those individuals the moniker “body snatchers.”
The process to provide cadavers today is a little different, but not by as much as you’d think.
What Are Body Brokers?
Body brokers are businesses that purport to connect medical schools, surgical residents, forensic specialists, medical researchers and other medical professionals with the cadavers they need through donors who wished to have their remains donated to science. It seems like a simple plan, but it gets weird. Real weird.
There are no state-level laws or codes that regulate who can start a business as a body broker, and there are no federal laws or regulations that specify how the brokers should receive, catalog, inventory or transport the donations they receive, or how to organize and manage the supply chain of c ..
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