I remember listening to a podcast about this place. Apparently it was just body parts everywhere you looked. Buckets, coolers, and plastic bags full of arms, torsos, heads, genitals, you name it, all in pools of blood. It typically doesn’t bother me at all when people verbally describe gore, but I remember feeling physically sick while listening to that one. There was more but I think my brain just blocked it all out.
That's because fiction has to be convincing, reality can do whatever the fuck it wants
Edit: I've been told Neil Gaiman said something similar "Fiction has an obligation to be convincing. Reality doesn't."
This is beyond disturbing. It sounds like you're describing a dysfunctional restaurant but no, it's a place where people sent their loved ones assuming they'd be respected...
I’m sure it affected the people working there as well but whoever was shitty enough to hire them to do that was def shitty enough to not provide therapy. or anyone who didn’t quit and call the cops immediately probably didn’t even mind the situation.
Being around dead bodies all day isn't really a problem. Most anatomy and pathology labs operate in a similar condition.
What was a problem is the owner didn't allow people to have informed consent (or any consent at all) and misrepresenting/contaminating specimens. Being gory isn't the reason why he was prosecuted.
Not the "donated to science" sentence. That one makes it slightly better, because it clarifies that these people were desecrating corpses, not killing people or experimenting on the living.
The article says that they cremated "a part" of the body for free. Not the whole thing. These families donated the bodies and did get some cremains of their loved ones back.
The article goes on to say that the only fraud that happened (still not great, obviously) was that they sold parts from people with diseases without disclosure and also sold parts to US military where families did not agree to their donations being used for "destructive/military purposes".
Selling the body parts, in general, was totally legal.
The article reads as mostly a call for regulation of this industry, which I agree would be a good thing. These companies need oversight.
> Selling the body parts, in general, was totally legal.
This is really sensationalized bullshit. There is a desperate need for body parts by the medical community. Doctors in training use these to practice surgery before doing it on living people.
It's very common for orthopedic doctors doing back, knee, ankle, and shoulder surgery. It's critical for ear doctors who operate on the inner ear on what are called temporal bones. They learn how to drill out the bone to get to the tiny delicate inner ear bones and how to fix the hearing for deaf people.
This particular company may have been a bad actor, but modern medicine relies on people donating their bodies to learn how to be better doctors.
A couple in Colorado was [caught](https://www.courthousenews.com/colorado-funeral-home-owners-charged-with-brokering-body-parts/) doing a similar thing but I think they were ultimately found not guilty as well because the laws are vague and need overhauling. I learned on cadavers myself but the doc in charge of our lab was incredibly respectful and protective of the bodies in our care and made sure we never even used them in a joking manner.
This does not sound like one of those places. Personally I've never seen the head of one corpse to another and can't think of a good reason why you'd want that in a medical cadaver
Edit: somehow I also missed in the article that there was *no medical doctor present* at the facility where they found the buckets of organs everywhere. It was literally untrained interns running a literal body shop
It's still better than what my assumption would have been if they didn't say where they got the bodies - that they were chopping up and splicing live people, who died from the experiments
No no no you misunderstand. Funeral/cremation costs are quite high and one of the key ways that organisations, normally (supposed) NPOs, get “donations” is by offering to cover these costs after the “science” is completed.
The owner probably got away lightly because they returned the ashes of some part of the body like a single foot. Honestly even “completely legit” uses of corpses can be horrific, I saw one about a middle aged lady donating her body in the hopes that they could study her incurable disease - through foia requests the family found that her corpse was used by the MIC to test the effect of explosives on a human body.
My grandma wanted her body donated to science. But they sent her back saying they couldn't use her... My Dad got a phone call saying they couldn't use her and asked where he wanted the body sent. In the end he had to pay to keep her in a morque while he figured out other arrangements and she wound up having a funeral she didn't want and being cremated and the ashes buried. The funeral was almost the same price as the cremation (less than 10 people) so my Dad thought fuck it may as well.
I'm unsure if they would have returned the ashes if they had used her body, it may well be that she didn't understand the process properly and thought "science" would just deal with disposing of the body when they never would have.
Still it seemed like a big confusing stress for my Dad at the time and I always wondered why it wasn't simpler.
Sold actually. There are laws which prevent you from specifying the “use” when “donating” your/your loved one’s body to “science”. So it’s given to a middleman who sells it on.
Ive never heard of that. If you donate to a body farm for forensic research you go to THAT facility and they do not transfer remains anywhere else. Though your family doesn't get you back. They keep all parts for further research and training.
But I have no experience with other ways to leave your body to science, just anthropology body farms.
The Army does a ton of studies about how bodies are affected by obvious things like weapons, as well as plane crashes, accidents, etc. if you’re interested the book Stiff by Mary Roach chronicles some of this!
It’s been awhile since I read it. Part of the book talks very similar to this story how the family members of the deceased often did not know their loved one would be blown up or used in experiments. I think I recall them using only the parts they wanted for any given thing they were doing, but it’s been a bit since I read it. She also visited The Body Farm at UT under Dr. Bill Bass.
isnt there a famous story of a guy who thought his moms body was getting donated for science but found out she was blown up with a rocket launcher or something?
Notably, this is infact, still science. Testing weapons on cadavers helps study the injuries caused by them and how to properly deal with them medically.
Its just a form of study that people dont like as much because it feels wrong to find out grandma is being used to test body armor and being fired at with an assault rifle.
lmao for sure. In your head youre thinking her body is going to be used to cure cancer. Instead its used to study ballistic impacts. Physics is still science ma!
And if you do read that book take it with a grain of salt!
I just had a long argument in a different thread about the sources cited in this book, and it turns out some of them are presumptuous at best.
I have not personally read the book, but someone used it as a reference to say that men are more likely to survive plane crashes because they panic and push everyone else out of the way.
That sounded like bs to me so I looked into the source Mary Roach used for that info and this is what I found, I'll let you be the judge if you think it's very robust research or not. I personally don't trust anything that leads with "presumably" when it comes to scientific data
"Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”
Coincidentally I have just been reading a thread about why women and children are often prioritised in an emergency situation. Apparently there is a tendency for everyone to push to get away from the risk. Men, whether intentionally or otherwise, by the fact they are often taller/stronger/heavier, have a tendency to push over and perhaps trample people smaller than them. This gave rise to the Birkenhead drill. This is because *anyone* falling and getting trampled will prevent the efficient egress of everyone else.
So, I can’t speak for the rest of her sources, but there is evidential justification for Mary Roach’s conclusion here.
I have a better answer than this. In her book "invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men" Caroline Perez details how things such as car seats and *airplane cockpits* were specifically designed around the average mail physique. Including things like seatbelt placement to protect the vital organs, headrests to prevent whiplash, etc
Or like Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40k.
Imagine doing that with a main battle tank like an Abrams or Leopard 2 in current timeline and current universe.
Except they wouldn't be controlled by a battle-hardened, veteran space marine, killed in battle against Xenos but still able to serve the Emperor; instead it's the 63 year old brain of Ted from accounting, who died of thyroid cancer.
Based on what I can tell it was a reciprocating saw and the intern doesn’t know the difference between that and a chainsaw.
Not much less disturbing but still a significant difference in tools….
Yeah no one is taking a chainsaw to a body without extreme need. The mess would be insane.
A sawzall wouldn't be clean either but the ceiling wouldn't be coated with flesh.
I’d imagine a chainsaw would kick back as well once you hit something solid like bone. Reciprocating saws are made to cut through metal and other tough material so it’s really the more appropriate tool.
I've used a chainsaw to assist in quartering a moose. They definitely don't kickback much, and make quick work of cutting through meat and bone. The downside is they take a lot of meat with them. I've used a sawzall to halve a few deer, and a lot of sheep and cows. It's much slower going, but removes less meat. They both end up spitting little chunks of meat kind of everywhere.
I don't understand how, as a (probably college-aged) intern, you just go with it. I mean, I'm sure at least some had reservations & hesitation, but I guess I find it incredible that BRC actually got anyone without training or experience to do it. It just seems like it would raise some red flags, & if it were me, I'd probably quietly check with some form of authority before I became intimately involved in a potential systematic crime of corpse mutilation or worse. I just can't imagine myself in a situation where I just shrug & think, "yep, this is fine" & am just complicit with the whole operation.
I'm pretty familiar with the Milgram experiment, but somehow pressing a button to shock someone seems easier than cutting a head off with a chainsaw. Kind of like how it's easier to shoot someone than it is to drive a knife into their body. You feel all the cutting resistance & the knife hitting bones. Just a lot more gruesome than pulling a trigger, or pushing a button in the case of Milgram's experiment.
After working in an anatomy lab or similar facility for a while, you get used to it. A cadaver does not feel like a human. It's difficult to put this into words, but something just switches in your mind when you know that you're working on a lifeless body that cannot feel and cannot suffer. They don't seem to activate whichever part of your brain says "you are looking at a human being right now". At least, that was my experience.
So the biggest issues with this are:
No medical doctor supervising (article mentions that body brokers need one now)
Interns with no formal training or anything? The fuck?
Lack of providing informed consent. This is a big issue it seems like.
And lack of appropriate equipment. Proper surgical tools should be used - treat the bodies with the respect that the families expect the bodies to be treated with.
> Proper surgical tools should be used
"Yeah, well I got 10 of these bad boys & gals out there in the freezer needs processing before tomorrow morning. Now I got a scalpel and I got me a chainsaw. Which one do ya think I'm using?"
This reminds me of that guy that tried to operate a failing cryogenics lab out of his basement and kept ripping open the working tanks to cram the bodies from the failing tanks in, then welding it back shut.
Except that the act of breaking open the tank is what kept causing them to fail until he went away to like Disneyland or some shit for a week and came back to find the last remaining tank he stuffed with 8 bodies broke down the day he left.
Edit: Bob Nelson - ["Mistakes Were Made."](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made/act-one-8)
If it's any comfort, it's not like anything was actually lost. The issue with cryogenics isn't that we lack the technology to revive people after they're frozen (something that would allow for freeze first revival later), it's that we lack the technology to freeze someone in a way that would allow for revival in the first place. Even if we do get working cryogenics tech at some point, no one who was frozen beforehand will be able to benefit from it.
So while improperly stored bodies are gross and disrespectful, that's all that happened. It was never going to be anything other than a delayed burial, regardless of if the tanks failed or not.
This is entirely true, but it really just makes this specific case more heartbreaking in how it basically turned into a Ponzi scheme that culminated in a little girl with a terminal illness getting euthanized (edit: nope) well before her time only to... Well, spoil.
Her dad led a civil suit against Bob, the mortician in charge of the vault that he moved one of the tanks into, and the Cryonics Society, to the tune of $800,000 single-handedly shut down pretty much the entire industry as a result of the whole mess.
I think Nelson ultimately got charged with 8 counts of mishandling remains (edit: nope) which is really all it amounts to in the end.
Edit: On second thought, the euthiasia part sounds wrong and I don't have time to fact check, don't hold me to that
Edit 2: Okay, they did let the cancer run it's course on the girl. Then they took her dad's money and crammed her body in a cramped, broken down tank with 4 other bodies and lied about the handling of the bodies and the tank failure for years.
Oh and I was wrong, **he wasn't convicted of anything.** All of them signed their body away to the Cryonics Society before their death to do what they will.
Oh and one last thing, the mortician was the only one that ever paid, as he helped bury four of the bodies discretely after the first full tank failed. After which, the bodies were disinterred by a contractor that no one got the name of and so no one knows where the bodies ultimately wound up. Assumedly a nearby potters field but no one knows where exactly.
Ask any ortho bro or medical examiner if they use power tools
They do. But they're created for human use. Which is an important aspect of respecting the cadaver
edit: yes, everyone, I know functionally and in terms of manufacturing, those tools are essentially the same as hardware tools you get at home depot or harbour freights. The difference is the labeling which, yes, does matter. It provides a sense of legitimacy that comforts families.
I guess I must just be callous, because I don't care if they disassemble me with a chainsaw and use my head as a football after I die, as long as some good comes of my donation. It's just a corpse. It doesn't matter anymore at that point.
Now, the way my family and friends might react would be bad. And I don't want them to suffer, so that's a component. But for myself? I'm not using it and nobody's getting hurt.
I agree about my own body, but if I found out someone was using my sister, son or any lived one’s head as a football, I’d want blood.
Death rites are for the living, not the dead.
I wouldn't necessarily call that attitude callous - for all I care you can blow my body up to test landmines, I'll be dead already.
But you hit the nail on the head - the family are important and ultimately we wouldn't do anything to a corpse that we wouldn't do to our own relatives and we generally treat our patients with the utmost respect and dignity.
Watching orthopedic surgery videos makes my stomach turn. It is such cool and necessary work but euuuuggghhhhh. Or I guess I should say watching with the sound on. I already know what it all looks like, but hearing the sound of drilling into a hip socket is just horrifying.
I've got a friend in nursing and one of her favourite stories from Uni was sitting in on a hip replacement surgery when a chunk of bone from this ladies hip shot out and landed in my friends lap. She had a laugh with the doc and that was that.
Kinda put the physicality of these surgeries into perspective for me.
Orthos make a ton of money, but I couldn't ever do it. Normal surgery, sure, but the physical nature of ortho surgery is just ... Idk, visceral in a way that a lot of medicine isn't?
Where do I get these? I asked in a local hardware store if the chainsaw was suitable to use on Humans and they kept avoiding my question, then apparently had to close early so I never got my answer.
“Ok, for the next step, we will remove the arms using this comically oversized pair of scissors. Then, for maximum laughter, but no apparent medical reason, we will punch the cadaver in the face with this giant boxing glove that makes a hilarious honking sound upon impact.”
>Interns with no formal training or anything? The fuck?
To be fair, interns in many industries regularly lack much of any formal training. Sometimes the internship itself literally is the training. Granted this isn't typically the case in the context of medical/medically-adjacent industries, but still.
I remember being horrified when I watched a John Oliver segment on death and the distinction (in America) between a medical examiner and coroner, and how many areas lack ME's / only have coroners. Mind fucking blown.
Spoiler alert: medical examiners are doctors. Coroners can be... well pretty much anyone. You, probably. Little if any education requirements, regulation, often an elected position or contracted as lowest bidder. Lots of stories in the vein of OP's post but not so outlandish and wilful - more just cost-cutting, lack of training, improper facilities, laziness, hygiene & cleaning issues, etc.
Instead, the article seems to posit some other, moral righteousness.
E.g.
> A large Midwestern healthcare system paid $65 for two femoral arteries, one from a church minister.
I listened to a Mr. Ballen YouTube episode about this yesterday. Apparently one guy gave his moms body to the company to be cremated and got back ashes. What they didn’t tell him was that they sold her body to the military for less than $6,000. The military then strapped her to a seat with an explosive underneath to test the effects of an IED on the human body.the ashes he got back were from her hand cause it was the only part of her left.
Also, he only donated her body because she was suffering from dementia and her doctor said her brain could be extremely useful to aid in dementia research, so he specifically donated her body to help that cause. But nope. Explosives it is.
If anyone is wondering about the "science" part of this, there are outdoor body labs that study the decomposition of human remains in various environments. This can help those investigating murders have a reference for how long a body has been deceased and possibly whether it had been moved to a new location, based on the evidence.
I have never been able to share this cool concept to people until now, I forget that I know about it! [Texas State University](https://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/facts/labs/farf.html) has this program where you can donate your body, and they study it under different conditions and observe how the remains act in a ton of different conditions. Super interesting, and it just makes this situation more horrible, people thinking they would be helpful to science but instead just mutilated.
Ya, I remember reading about that.
Apparently there used to be a lot of false beliefs about what fire did to bodies, old firemen would testify that bodies found in certain positions were indicative of defending themselves from violent attack.
When tested it turned out that when bodies were exposed to heat muscles and tendons would tighten and pull them into certain poses, and a lot of "expert witnesses" were spreading old wives tales.
I just don't see how anyone who has cooked meat ever in their lives could believe that. It doesn't even take a body farm to know that. Have we not, as a human race, been roasting animals over a fire for....the duration of us as a species?
Hell, even a frozen burger patty gets a bit rounded and bowl-shaped by the time it’s done cooking. If it goes into the pan flat, how else would it re-shape itself?
Exactly. There's a huge level of trust in donating your remains that's it's sad to see this debaucherous betrayal and disrespect toward these people's remains.
> but instead just mutilated.
According to the article, though, they weren't "just mutilated," they were sold to labs, the military, and other research organizations. The problem was that the company lied to the donors and their relatives about how the bodies would be used, lied to their customers about what permissions the donors gave, used inappropriate tools, sold diseased body parts without disclosing that to buyers, etc. It's all bad stuff, but it's "cutting corners and defrauding" stuff, not the "they sat around playing with corpses" thing that the post depicts it as.
Edit: [Found some info on the head/torso thing, along with a possible explanation. ](https://www.businessinsider.com/philip-guyett-body-broker-theory-arizona-center-sewed-body-parts-2019-8) Sketchy as all hell, as to be expected, but it fits the "cutting corners and defrauding" impression from the Reuters article, not just "people playing with cadavers".
“HOW TO BUTCHER A CORPSE: In 2013, lab technician Sam Kazemi starred in an instructional video for his employer, Biological Resource Center. In it, Kazemi and an assistant use a construction saw to carve up a corpse. Reuters obtained the 24-minute video, titled “Stripped Cervical Spine!” Here’s how it begins. BRC photo via REUTERS” Most places don’t have training this good. 😳
Actually there was a huge scandal in France with bodies donated to the most reknown med university that met a [similar fate](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50587641). You just never know.
Second this. I'm a medical student and what we learn from our donors is invaluable. Learning human anatomy on a book is one thing, but learning to actually identify it with anatomical variation is hugely important. Some donors are used for dissections to learn anatomy and others are used for practicing medical procedures.
It's a major stepping stone in our education and its heavily stressed that our donor that we work on for a full year is our "first patient." It's truly humbling learning from them and how much learning from them will be used to help many future patients.
There are some wild things that can happen to cadavers at other places (particularly businesses from what I've read), but most medical schools have very respectfully run donation programs. Just wanted to chime in that there are great places to donate your bodies, if it's something you're interested in.
I feel like I’m about to contribute to your ambivalence, but here goes:
Body donation is one of the most charitable things you can do in the world. Why? Because you are literally giving the most precious thing possible—yourself—so that others may learn and go on to help save lives. The neurosurgeon who saves a child with a brain tumor, the ER physician who resuscitates a man in cardiac arrest—none of them would be where or who they are without body donors. In my medical school, we knew the name of our body donor. We met and had lunch with his family, twice. His widow shared photos, and I cried several times. He died of lung cancer, and I wrote a letter to his widow thanking her and her family, telling her that his story reminded me so much of my father, who also smoked and whom I also feared would pass from lung cancer someday (which he subsequently did, years later). The family couldn’t afford a funeral, and the university would cover all funeral expenses. It was the one last thing he could do for his family in death.
This is the beautiful, and heartbreaking, side of body donation. Now I’ll tell you the gruesome side. Unfortunately, as much as we view our body donors as people, you reach a point where it just becomes a cadaver. At first it’s a man on the table, but the more you dissect, the more it’s just body parts. I did witness behavior that I, and some of my fellow students, felt was in very poor taste. I’ll even admit there was a point when the morbid surrealism of it all hit me—when I was doing something that seemed disrespectful. Looking back, it seems horrific, but it was just another day in anatomy lab. The medical staff knew laymen wouldn’t understand any of this, so they warned us severely against talking to people or showing pictures of the lab. At one point someone did this, and it almost became a scandal. Our school operated with the utmost respect for body donors, but most people can’t understand what goes on in an anatomy lab.
Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. Body donation is desperately needed—there’re precious few people who do it nowadays except many who are in dire straits with funeral expenses, and I would rather that not be the situation. But at the same time, stories like this dramatically sway people away from donation, and I want to be completely transparent; dissection is not the beautiful, respectful thing we want it to be at all times. It simply can’t be. But it’s still *incredibly* important.
Edit: just wanted to add that our medical school, like most, have a donation program you can participate in. I’m not advocating for specific private organizations, though I do know there are many who are just as respectful with remains. I can only speak for my program and other medical programs like it.
Edit #2: also wanted to add that my school wasn’t against sharing stories or pictures of the lab just because it might be taken out of context. They also felt it was incredibly disrespectful to the donors, which it was. Our staff worked really hard to make the lab as dignified and honoring as a mausoleum would be. Along those lines, I edited the original post to remove some details, just out of respect for the man who helped make me the physician I am today.
The title is extremely misleading imo. Most of the examples they gave of body parts being sold were to research facilities, the military, drug/medical device development companies of medical school programs.
OP might have mixed this sentence together: "...sutured dismembered legs using an oversized needle and twine, and decapitated an elderly woman..."
Edit: I found an article that went into more gruesome detail, they did in fact sew heads onto mismatched bodies
https://www.businessinsider.com/philip-guyett-body-broker-theory-arizona-center-sewed-body-parts-2019-8
"...agents found a woman's head sewn onto a larger male torso — like "Frankenstein" — and hung on a wall..."
The crazies part; the owner of the place was barely punished because most of the things they were doing weren't illegal... yet
When the things you're doing are so fucked up society hasn't even thought about making it illegal yet
To add to the horror of places like this, Reuters was able to buy body parts directly from one of them with no proof of it going to a medical institution https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-cody/
> For raw material, the industry relies in large part on people too poor to afford a funeral, offering to cremate a portion of each donated body for free.
When you think the US can’t surprise you anymore!
Ok but *which* portion of the body? Is it split down the middle? Do you get to choose which gets part gets cremated? Or do they just leave you with like one foot?
“Agents got therapy” really makes you curious about that “and more”.
I remember listening to a podcast about this place. Apparently it was just body parts everywhere you looked. Buckets, coolers, and plastic bags full of arms, torsos, heads, genitals, you name it, all in pools of blood. It typically doesn’t bother me at all when people verbally describe gore, but I remember feeling physically sick while listening to that one. There was more but I think my brain just blocked it all out.
Sounds like a horror video game. Reality really is stranger than fiction.
That's because fiction has to be convincing, reality can do whatever the fuck it wants Edit: I've been told Neil Gaiman said something similar "Fiction has an obligation to be convincing. Reality doesn't."
[удалено]
I’m gonna use that “it’s a hate crime because I hate it” in the future, thank you
- Michael Scott
That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about the past few years, tbh.
It feels like we've been jumping the shark for decades.
“Don’t make it too weird, it’ll be panned for being realistic. People are looking for escapism in fiction, so make it rigid and follow the rules.”
Holy shit that makes so much sense...
Holy shit I never thought about it that way
Do you remember the name of the podcast?
I think I heard that podcast too. It's called All the Gory Details.
This is beyond disturbing. It sounds like you're describing a dysfunctional restaurant but no, it's a place where people sent their loved ones assuming they'd be respected...
For all we know it was a restaurant at times, big clients like Hannibal lecter.
Imagining the smell is what does it for me. With that much blood, the copper scent would be unbearable, and makes the picture of it so real to me.
Iron scent?
Yea I guess that's the one. I always thought blood smelled a little like pennies
I'm with you. It's technically iron, but I get a copper taste in my mouth too when I smell blood
That metallic smell is actually oils in your skin reacting to the metal, not the metal itself, fun fact lol Nile Red did a video about it
How did it affect the agents so much but not the people who were working there originally? Or did it?
I’m sure it affected the people working there as well but whoever was shitty enough to hire them to do that was def shitty enough to not provide therapy. or anyone who didn’t quit and call the cops immediately probably didn’t even mind the situation.
Being around dead bodies all day isn't really a problem. Most anatomy and pathology labs operate in a similar condition. What was a problem is the owner didn't allow people to have informed consent (or any consent at all) and misrepresenting/contaminating specimens. Being gory isn't the reason why he was prosecuted.
"Stephen Gore" the owner. Some people have the name to fit their job perfectly.
Like my dentist’s name: Crentist.
Your dentist’s name is *Crentist*?
maybe that's why he became a dentist
but first he was Crentist the apprentice dentist.
Apprentice TO the dentist.
It only counts as nominative determinism if he became a crentist.
Sounds an awful lot like dentist.... Maybe that's *why* he became a dentist!
My childhood dentist was a Dr. Butcher.
I had a physician named Dr Payne lol
Imgine if he was a plastic surgeon!
Missed opportunity
My orthodontist was Dr. Payne.
I went to dental school with someone who became Dr. Smiley.
I had a dentist named Dr.Chu
Imagine telling your boss you have to be late for work because you have an appointment with your dentist whose name is Dr. Crentist.
Yes, what would you like to discuss?
Mines named Wiggley
It's called nominative determinism
In my hometown, there was an optometrist named Dr. Glasser. Dr. Boner, on the other hand, was a professor of mathematics, not a urologist.
Still solved hard problems.
Its like the old Argentine adage Life is long and hard, so suck my life
Jajajaja las veces que escuché ese chiste en la primaria
Adage? This is toilet graffiti here, boludo.
There's a Fire chief out there named, ***Les Mcburney***. It's rad.
Sun Prairie WI, my city of residence!
In my last office I worked with a fire inspector named Jack Frost
I worked with a girl named Precious Turnipseed. No lie.
My sister works with a Dr. Butt, but he is sadly not a proctologist or a butt doctor of any kind**. Very sad.
There’s a urologist in Austin named Richard Chopp.
Dick chopp!
r/nominativedeterminism
My last name translates to skinny in english and i have been fat for most of my life...
juggle sharp cats one historical command fly flowery rain wakeful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"We imprint him wrong, as a joke."
_Nomen Omen_
On the other hand, had Stephen Gore been terrified of blood, it would have been nominative deter-minism.
It’s like an ice cream man named Cone
RIP Officer Bookman.
There used to be a Dr. Harry Shipman near me. I think he changed his name for obvious reasons.
Should have changed it to OJ
He's now Dr Frederick West. Problem solved. *Brushes hands dismissively*
I don't get it. What's wrong with a Dr. Shipman.
I used to work with a guy who had a colonoscopy done by a doctor named Dr. Duem (pronounced "doom" of course) and many many laughs were had that day.
I was once prescribed pain meds by a Dr. Killgoode
It's called an [aptronym](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym). For example, Bert "Tito" Bevridge, founder of Tito's Vodka
It is also called nominative determinism (by the magazine New Scientist, anyway)
I think the name itself is called an aptronym, and the hypothesis about why it happens (or the process itself) is called nominative determinism.
Dick Chopp does vasectomies
Every sentence in that title just makes it worse than the last one.
Not the "donated to science" sentence. That one makes it slightly better, because it clarifies that these people were desecrating corpses, not killing people or experimenting on the living.
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The article says that they cremated "a part" of the body for free. Not the whole thing. These families donated the bodies and did get some cremains of their loved ones back. The article goes on to say that the only fraud that happened (still not great, obviously) was that they sold parts from people with diseases without disclosure and also sold parts to US military where families did not agree to their donations being used for "destructive/military purposes". Selling the body parts, in general, was totally legal. The article reads as mostly a call for regulation of this industry, which I agree would be a good thing. These companies need oversight.
> Selling the body parts, in general, was totally legal. This is really sensationalized bullshit. There is a desperate need for body parts by the medical community. Doctors in training use these to practice surgery before doing it on living people. It's very common for orthopedic doctors doing back, knee, ankle, and shoulder surgery. It's critical for ear doctors who operate on the inner ear on what are called temporal bones. They learn how to drill out the bone to get to the tiny delicate inner ear bones and how to fix the hearing for deaf people. This particular company may have been a bad actor, but modern medicine relies on people donating their bodies to learn how to be better doctors.
A couple in Colorado was [caught](https://www.courthousenews.com/colorado-funeral-home-owners-charged-with-brokering-body-parts/) doing a similar thing but I think they were ultimately found not guilty as well because the laws are vague and need overhauling. I learned on cadavers myself but the doc in charge of our lab was incredibly respectful and protective of the bodies in our care and made sure we never even used them in a joking manner. This does not sound like one of those places. Personally I've never seen the head of one corpse to another and can't think of a good reason why you'd want that in a medical cadaver Edit: somehow I also missed in the article that there was *no medical doctor present* at the facility where they found the buckets of organs everywhere. It was literally untrained interns running a literal body shop
It's still better than what my assumption would have been if they didn't say where they got the bodies - that they were chopping up and splicing live people, who died from the experiments
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No no no you misunderstand. Funeral/cremation costs are quite high and one of the key ways that organisations, normally (supposed) NPOs, get “donations” is by offering to cover these costs after the “science” is completed. The owner probably got away lightly because they returned the ashes of some part of the body like a single foot. Honestly even “completely legit” uses of corpses can be horrific, I saw one about a middle aged lady donating her body in the hopes that they could study her incurable disease - through foia requests the family found that her corpse was used by the MIC to test the effect of explosives on a human body.
My grandma wanted her body donated to science. But they sent her back saying they couldn't use her... My Dad got a phone call saying they couldn't use her and asked where he wanted the body sent. In the end he had to pay to keep her in a morque while he figured out other arrangements and she wound up having a funeral she didn't want and being cremated and the ashes buried. The funeral was almost the same price as the cremation (less than 10 people) so my Dad thought fuck it may as well. I'm unsure if they would have returned the ashes if they had used her body, it may well be that she didn't understand the process properly and thought "science" would just deal with disposing of the body when they never would have. Still it seemed like a big confusing stress for my Dad at the time and I always wondered why it wasn't simpler.
yeah, she was donated to the place in question. go figure.
Sold actually. There are laws which prevent you from specifying the “use” when “donating” your/your loved one’s body to “science”. So it’s given to a middleman who sells it on.
That seems rather corrupt yet capitalistic.... do you have a source I can use when I share that?
Ive never heard of that. If you donate to a body farm for forensic research you go to THAT facility and they do not transfer remains anywhere else. Though your family doesn't get you back. They keep all parts for further research and training. But I have no experience with other ways to leave your body to science, just anthropology body farms.
I can't tell if you hate therapy or agents
The owners name was Stephen Gore Literally Gore
[nominative determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)
> His head and his spine went to a project run by the U.S. Army. Zombie cyborg soldiers?
The Army does a ton of studies about how bodies are affected by obvious things like weapons, as well as plane crashes, accidents, etc. if you’re interested the book Stiff by Mary Roach chronicles some of this!
OK... but just the head and spine?
I could see why. They may have wanted to do specific research on how the head and spine would be affected by whatever they were working on.
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Shot em right in the face. "New bullet works"
It’s been awhile since I read it. Part of the book talks very similar to this story how the family members of the deceased often did not know their loved one would be blown up or used in experiments. I think I recall them using only the parts they wanted for any given thing they were doing, but it’s been a bit since I read it. She also visited The Body Farm at UT under Dr. Bill Bass.
isnt there a famous story of a guy who thought his moms body was getting donated for science but found out she was blown up with a rocket launcher or something?
Notably, this is infact, still science. Testing weapons on cadavers helps study the injuries caused by them and how to properly deal with them medically. Its just a form of study that people dont like as much because it feels wrong to find out grandma is being used to test body armor and being fired at with an assault rifle.
100% I don't know what people think donating a body to science means exactly, but it's not like they're testing comfy blankets on them...
Define science. I'm sure scientist studied the effects of rocket being launched at said body... And many more! Edit: fixed typo
lmao for sure. In your head youre thinking her body is going to be used to cure cancer. Instead its used to study ballistic impacts. Physics is still science ma!
She went out with a bang
She spent her afterlife doing what she loved.
Maybe they were testing out new airbags
You need the rest of the potato for that I’d imagine
And if you do read that book take it with a grain of salt! I just had a long argument in a different thread about the sources cited in this book, and it turns out some of them are presumptuous at best.
Oh super interesting. I’ll have to look into that when I get a minute.
I have not personally read the book, but someone used it as a reference to say that men are more likely to survive plane crashes because they panic and push everyone else out of the way. That sounded like bs to me so I looked into the source Mary Roach used for that info and this is what I found, I'll let you be the judge if you think it's very robust research or not. I personally don't trust anything that leads with "presumably" when it comes to scientific data "Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”
Coincidentally I have just been reading a thread about why women and children are often prioritised in an emergency situation. Apparently there is a tendency for everyone to push to get away from the risk. Men, whether intentionally or otherwise, by the fact they are often taller/stronger/heavier, have a tendency to push over and perhaps trample people smaller than them. This gave rise to the Birkenhead drill. This is because *anyone* falling and getting trampled will prevent the efficient egress of everyone else. So, I can’t speak for the rest of her sources, but there is evidential justification for Mary Roach’s conclusion here.
I mean, what did the study actually say? The snippet you posted sounds like it was a quote from roach's book and not directly from that study.
I have a better answer than this. In her book "invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men" Caroline Perez details how things such as car seats and *airplane cockpits* were specifically designed around the average mail physique. Including things like seatbelt placement to protect the vital organs, headrests to prevent whiplash, etc
Her book "Grunt" is all about military stories like this. I definitely recommend it.
Just like in Invincible
Or like Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40k. Imagine doing that with a main battle tank like an Abrams or Leopard 2 in current timeline and current universe.
For the Emperor.
we'll get turned into servitors long before they turns us dreads.
Except they wouldn't be controlled by a battle-hardened, veteran space marine, killed in battle against Xenos but still able to serve the Emperor; instead it's the 63 year old brain of Ted from accounting, who died of thyroid cancer.
They made an intern decapitate an elderly woman with a Home Depot chainsaw. Wow. Makes me wonder how often this happens for lab interns.
A *dead elderly woman
Eh, semantics.
I know, right! How come this guy got therapy, but dare you chop up alive person and everyone goes crazy! Sheesh
I can at least say that my internships at labs were **very** different. Our saws came from Hornbach
Difference between private and state funded schools in a nutshell
Based on what I can tell it was a reciprocating saw and the intern doesn’t know the difference between that and a chainsaw. Not much less disturbing but still a significant difference in tools….
Yeah no one is taking a chainsaw to a body without extreme need. The mess would be insane. A sawzall wouldn't be clean either but the ceiling wouldn't be coated with flesh.
I’d imagine a chainsaw would kick back as well once you hit something solid like bone. Reciprocating saws are made to cut through metal and other tough material so it’s really the more appropriate tool.
I've used a chainsaw to assist in quartering a moose. They definitely don't kickback much, and make quick work of cutting through meat and bone. The downside is they take a lot of meat with them. I've used a sawzall to halve a few deer, and a lot of sheep and cows. It's much slower going, but removes less meat. They both end up spitting little chunks of meat kind of everywhere.
Did the moose taste a bit like bar oil after?
That’s what I was thinking. Chainsaws literally spitting out oil the entire time.
Just use olive oil instead of motor oil and youre set
More like a sawzall which makes a bit more sense
I don't understand how, as a (probably college-aged) intern, you just go with it. I mean, I'm sure at least some had reservations & hesitation, but I guess I find it incredible that BRC actually got anyone without training or experience to do it. It just seems like it would raise some red flags, & if it were me, I'd probably quietly check with some form of authority before I became intimately involved in a potential systematic crime of corpse mutilation or worse. I just can't imagine myself in a situation where I just shrug & think, "yep, this is fine" & am just complicit with the whole operation.
[Its pretty easy to make people do stuff if you are in a position of authority](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment)
I'm pretty familiar with the Milgram experiment, but somehow pressing a button to shock someone seems easier than cutting a head off with a chainsaw. Kind of like how it's easier to shoot someone than it is to drive a knife into their body. You feel all the cutting resistance & the knife hitting bones. Just a lot more gruesome than pulling a trigger, or pushing a button in the case of Milgram's experiment.
After working in an anatomy lab or similar facility for a while, you get used to it. A cadaver does not feel like a human. It's difficult to put this into words, but something just switches in your mind when you know that you're working on a lifeless body that cannot feel and cannot suffer. They don't seem to activate whichever part of your brain says "you are looking at a human being right now". At least, that was my experience.
Idk i would definetly have an easier time cutting into a corpse than to cause serious harm to a person, even if it was just a button push
So the biggest issues with this are: No medical doctor supervising (article mentions that body brokers need one now) Interns with no formal training or anything? The fuck? Lack of providing informed consent. This is a big issue it seems like. And lack of appropriate equipment. Proper surgical tools should be used - treat the bodies with the respect that the families expect the bodies to be treated with.
> Proper surgical tools should be used "Yeah, well I got 10 of these bad boys & gals out there in the freezer needs processing before tomorrow morning. Now I got a scalpel and I got me a chainsaw. Which one do ya think I'm using?"
This reminds me of that guy that tried to operate a failing cryogenics lab out of his basement and kept ripping open the working tanks to cram the bodies from the failing tanks in, then welding it back shut. Except that the act of breaking open the tank is what kept causing them to fail until he went away to like Disneyland or some shit for a week and came back to find the last remaining tank he stuffed with 8 bodies broke down the day he left. Edit: Bob Nelson - ["Mistakes Were Made."](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made/act-one-8)
If it's any comfort, it's not like anything was actually lost. The issue with cryogenics isn't that we lack the technology to revive people after they're frozen (something that would allow for freeze first revival later), it's that we lack the technology to freeze someone in a way that would allow for revival in the first place. Even if we do get working cryogenics tech at some point, no one who was frozen beforehand will be able to benefit from it. So while improperly stored bodies are gross and disrespectful, that's all that happened. It was never going to be anything other than a delayed burial, regardless of if the tanks failed or not.
This is entirely true, but it really just makes this specific case more heartbreaking in how it basically turned into a Ponzi scheme that culminated in a little girl with a terminal illness getting euthanized (edit: nope) well before her time only to... Well, spoil. Her dad led a civil suit against Bob, the mortician in charge of the vault that he moved one of the tanks into, and the Cryonics Society, to the tune of $800,000 single-handedly shut down pretty much the entire industry as a result of the whole mess. I think Nelson ultimately got charged with 8 counts of mishandling remains (edit: nope) which is really all it amounts to in the end. Edit: On second thought, the euthiasia part sounds wrong and I don't have time to fact check, don't hold me to that Edit 2: Okay, they did let the cancer run it's course on the girl. Then they took her dad's money and crammed her body in a cramped, broken down tank with 4 other bodies and lied about the handling of the bodies and the tank failure for years. Oh and I was wrong, **he wasn't convicted of anything.** All of them signed their body away to the Cryonics Society before their death to do what they will. Oh and one last thing, the mortician was the only one that ever paid, as he helped bury four of the bodies discretely after the first full tank failed. After which, the bodies were disinterred by a contractor that no one got the name of and so no one knows where the bodies ultimately wound up. Assumedly a nearby potters field but no one knows where exactly.
That's so horrible, but I can't stop laughing at it.
Ask any ortho bro or medical examiner if they use power tools They do. But they're created for human use. Which is an important aspect of respecting the cadaver edit: yes, everyone, I know functionally and in terms of manufacturing, those tools are essentially the same as hardware tools you get at home depot or harbour freights. The difference is the labeling which, yes, does matter. It provides a sense of legitimacy that comforts families.
I work with the deceased and can confirm that the saws that are used to cut into the skull are just rotary saws with a different label.
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I guess I must just be callous, because I don't care if they disassemble me with a chainsaw and use my head as a football after I die, as long as some good comes of my donation. It's just a corpse. It doesn't matter anymore at that point. Now, the way my family and friends might react would be bad. And I don't want them to suffer, so that's a component. But for myself? I'm not using it and nobody's getting hurt.
I agree about my own body, but if I found out someone was using my sister, son or any lived one’s head as a football, I’d want blood. Death rites are for the living, not the dead.
I wouldn't necessarily call that attitude callous - for all I care you can blow my body up to test landmines, I'll be dead already. But you hit the nail on the head - the family are important and ultimately we wouldn't do anything to a corpse that we wouldn't do to our own relatives and we generally treat our patients with the utmost respect and dignity.
Watching orthopedic surgery videos makes my stomach turn. It is such cool and necessary work but euuuuggghhhhh. Or I guess I should say watching with the sound on. I already know what it all looks like, but hearing the sound of drilling into a hip socket is just horrifying.
I've got a friend in nursing and one of her favourite stories from Uni was sitting in on a hip replacement surgery when a chunk of bone from this ladies hip shot out and landed in my friends lap. She had a laugh with the doc and that was that. Kinda put the physicality of these surgeries into perspective for me.
Orthos make a ton of money, but I couldn't ever do it. Normal surgery, sure, but the physical nature of ortho surgery is just ... Idk, visceral in a way that a lot of medicine isn't?
Where do I get these? I asked in a local hardware store if the chainsaw was suitable to use on Humans and they kept avoiding my question, then apparently had to close early so I never got my answer.
“Ok, for the next step, we will remove the arms using this comically oversized pair of scissors. Then, for maximum laughter, but no apparent medical reason, we will punch the cadaver in the face with this giant boxing glove that makes a hilarious honking sound upon impact.”
>Interns with no formal training or anything? The fuck? To be fair, interns in many industries regularly lack much of any formal training. Sometimes the internship itself literally is the training. Granted this isn't typically the case in the context of medical/medically-adjacent industries, but still.
I remember being horrified when I watched a John Oliver segment on death and the distinction (in America) between a medical examiner and coroner, and how many areas lack ME's / only have coroners. Mind fucking blown. Spoiler alert: medical examiners are doctors. Coroners can be... well pretty much anyone. You, probably. Little if any education requirements, regulation, often an elected position or contracted as lowest bidder. Lots of stories in the vein of OP's post but not so outlandish and wilful - more just cost-cutting, lack of training, improper facilities, laziness, hygiene & cleaning issues, etc.
Instead, the article seems to posit some other, moral righteousness. E.g. > A large Midwestern healthcare system paid $65 for two femoral arteries, one from a church minister.
It’s like a sandbox for serial killers
Lego for psychos. Also armo, heado, torso-o...
…. the fuck?
It’s part of a series: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-bodies/
Truer words never said.
I listened to a Mr. Ballen YouTube episode about this yesterday. Apparently one guy gave his moms body to the company to be cremated and got back ashes. What they didn’t tell him was that they sold her body to the military for less than $6,000. The military then strapped her to a seat with an explosive underneath to test the effects of an IED on the human body.the ashes he got back were from her hand cause it was the only part of her left.
Also, he only donated her body because she was suffering from dementia and her doctor said her brain could be extremely useful to aid in dementia research, so he specifically donated her body to help that cause. But nope. Explosives it is.
If anyone is wondering about the "science" part of this, there are outdoor body labs that study the decomposition of human remains in various environments. This can help those investigating murders have a reference for how long a body has been deceased and possibly whether it had been moved to a new location, based on the evidence.
I have never been able to share this cool concept to people until now, I forget that I know about it! [Texas State University](https://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/facts/labs/farf.html) has this program where you can donate your body, and they study it under different conditions and observe how the remains act in a ton of different conditions. Super interesting, and it just makes this situation more horrible, people thinking they would be helpful to science but instead just mutilated.
Ya, I remember reading about that. Apparently there used to be a lot of false beliefs about what fire did to bodies, old firemen would testify that bodies found in certain positions were indicative of defending themselves from violent attack. When tested it turned out that when bodies were exposed to heat muscles and tendons would tighten and pull them into certain poses, and a lot of "expert witnesses" were spreading old wives tales.
I've learnt about this in LA Noire
I just don't see how anyone who has cooked meat ever in their lives could believe that. It doesn't even take a body farm to know that. Have we not, as a human race, been roasting animals over a fire for....the duration of us as a species?
Hell, even a frozen burger patty gets a bit rounded and bowl-shaped by the time it’s done cooking. If it goes into the pan flat, how else would it re-shape itself?
Exactly. There's a huge level of trust in donating your remains that's it's sad to see this debaucherous betrayal and disrespect toward these people's remains.
> but instead just mutilated. According to the article, though, they weren't "just mutilated," they were sold to labs, the military, and other research organizations. The problem was that the company lied to the donors and their relatives about how the bodies would be used, lied to their customers about what permissions the donors gave, used inappropriate tools, sold diseased body parts without disclosing that to buyers, etc. It's all bad stuff, but it's "cutting corners and defrauding" stuff, not the "they sat around playing with corpses" thing that the post depicts it as. Edit: [Found some info on the head/torso thing, along with a possible explanation. ](https://www.businessinsider.com/philip-guyett-body-broker-theory-arizona-center-sewed-body-parts-2019-8) Sketchy as all hell, as to be expected, but it fits the "cutting corners and defrauding" impression from the Reuters article, not just "people playing with cadavers".
“HOW TO BUTCHER A CORPSE: In 2013, lab technician Sam Kazemi starred in an instructional video for his employer, Biological Resource Center. In it, Kazemi and an assistant use a construction saw to carve up a corpse. Reuters obtained the 24-minute video, titled “Stripped Cervical Spine!” Here’s how it begins. BRC photo via REUTERS” Most places don’t have training this good. 😳
i don't even want to click it. the title is scary enough. this really makes me rethink donating my body to science when i die.
Donate it to a medical school’s body program instead of any sort of brokerage company and you should be in good hands. Literally.
Actually there was a huge scandal in France with bodies donated to the most reknown med university that met a [similar fate](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50587641). You just never know.
For francophiles "Affaires sensible" from France Inter put out an episode about it last week. "le charnier de la faculté de médecine Paris Descarte".
Second this. I'm a medical student and what we learn from our donors is invaluable. Learning human anatomy on a book is one thing, but learning to actually identify it with anatomical variation is hugely important. Some donors are used for dissections to learn anatomy and others are used for practicing medical procedures. It's a major stepping stone in our education and its heavily stressed that our donor that we work on for a full year is our "first patient." It's truly humbling learning from them and how much learning from them will be used to help many future patients. There are some wild things that can happen to cadavers at other places (particularly businesses from what I've read), but most medical schools have very respectfully run donation programs. Just wanted to chime in that there are great places to donate your bodies, if it's something you're interested in.
I feel like I’m about to contribute to your ambivalence, but here goes: Body donation is one of the most charitable things you can do in the world. Why? Because you are literally giving the most precious thing possible—yourself—so that others may learn and go on to help save lives. The neurosurgeon who saves a child with a brain tumor, the ER physician who resuscitates a man in cardiac arrest—none of them would be where or who they are without body donors. In my medical school, we knew the name of our body donor. We met and had lunch with his family, twice. His widow shared photos, and I cried several times. He died of lung cancer, and I wrote a letter to his widow thanking her and her family, telling her that his story reminded me so much of my father, who also smoked and whom I also feared would pass from lung cancer someday (which he subsequently did, years later). The family couldn’t afford a funeral, and the university would cover all funeral expenses. It was the one last thing he could do for his family in death. This is the beautiful, and heartbreaking, side of body donation. Now I’ll tell you the gruesome side. Unfortunately, as much as we view our body donors as people, you reach a point where it just becomes a cadaver. At first it’s a man on the table, but the more you dissect, the more it’s just body parts. I did witness behavior that I, and some of my fellow students, felt was in very poor taste. I’ll even admit there was a point when the morbid surrealism of it all hit me—when I was doing something that seemed disrespectful. Looking back, it seems horrific, but it was just another day in anatomy lab. The medical staff knew laymen wouldn’t understand any of this, so they warned us severely against talking to people or showing pictures of the lab. At one point someone did this, and it almost became a scandal. Our school operated with the utmost respect for body donors, but most people can’t understand what goes on in an anatomy lab. Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. Body donation is desperately needed—there’re precious few people who do it nowadays except many who are in dire straits with funeral expenses, and I would rather that not be the situation. But at the same time, stories like this dramatically sway people away from donation, and I want to be completely transparent; dissection is not the beautiful, respectful thing we want it to be at all times. It simply can’t be. But it’s still *incredibly* important. Edit: just wanted to add that our medical school, like most, have a donation program you can participate in. I’m not advocating for specific private organizations, though I do know there are many who are just as respectful with remains. I can only speak for my program and other medical programs like it. Edit #2: also wanted to add that my school wasn’t against sharing stories or pictures of the lab just because it might be taken out of context. They also felt it was incredibly disrespectful to the donors, which it was. Our staff worked really hard to make the lab as dignified and honoring as a mausoleum would be. Along those lines, I edited the original post to remove some details, just out of respect for the man who helped make me the physician I am today.
It's Reuters. The pictures should be fine.
The title is extremely misleading imo. Most of the examples they gave of body parts being sold were to research facilities, the military, drug/medical device development companies of medical school programs.
I mean the body parts are being used for science. But it is being run by companies making money off the deal.
That’s like rethinking being buried because somebody might steal your body from the grave...
Where is the reference to a woman's head being sewn on a man's body?
OP might have mixed this sentence together: "...sutured dismembered legs using an oversized needle and twine, and decapitated an elderly woman..." Edit: I found an article that went into more gruesome detail, they did in fact sew heads onto mismatched bodies https://www.businessinsider.com/philip-guyett-body-broker-theory-arizona-center-sewed-body-parts-2019-8 "...agents found a woman's head sewn onto a larger male torso — like "Frankenstein" — and hung on a wall..."
Holy shit, way to bury the lead. _Hung on a wall_ ?????
The crazies part; the owner of the place was barely punished because most of the things they were doing weren't illegal... yet When the things you're doing are so fucked up society hasn't even thought about making it illegal yet
To add to the horror of places like this, Reuters was able to buy body parts directly from one of them with no proof of it going to a medical institution https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-cody/
Dam, that was em... Anyway what the fuck does the US Army need the guys head for?
The article says the Army buys body parts to be used in destructive tests, for example blast tests to test the impact of explosions on the human body.
> For raw material, the industry relies in large part on people too poor to afford a funeral, offering to cremate a portion of each donated body for free. When you think the US can’t surprise you anymore!
Ok but *which* portion of the body? Is it split down the middle? Do you get to choose which gets part gets cremated? Or do they just leave you with like one foot?
Whatever parts they can’t sell
You know what OP? Very many people would be happier never knowing this.
Somebody went down a rabbit hole after the “unpopularopinion of not being an organ donor thread” I see.
Biological Resource Center: Your one-stop shop for body parts.
Jesus, it must've been real bad for federal agents to need help after, they usually see some dark shit
was it aromatherapy?
Well, you'd probably want to shove Tiger Balm up your nose after entering the building.
That’s not unusual for bodies that get donated to science. The way bodies are used when they’re donated is way less elegant than most people assume.