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Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb By Scott L. Newstok

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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark

Features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.

Body donation: The ultimate gift

Monday, 19 June 2006

By Josephine Marcotty
New York Times News Service

Ancient Egyptians built pyramids to memorialize the dead. Native Americans built burial mounds. Today, you can have the casket of your choice and a crypt at a cemetery, if you can afford it.

Or you can donate your body to Body Worlds, the anatomy exhibit that is touring the country. Your remains will be infused with plastic and put on display in science museums around the world. And in the latest twist in avant-garde memorializing, you can choose your eternal pose.

Gunther von Hagens, a German anatomist who created Body Worlds, says that's a far more personal choice than the Egyptians had - at best, they could only decide on the size of the pyramid.

But as a permanent specimen in his anatomical exhibit you'll have to forgo fame, because no one will know who you were. The preserved cadavers on display as part of the Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies at the Science Museum in Minneapolis are anonymous. And that's one of the few things that Body Worlds has in common with traditional body donation programs, such as those at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic.

"The anonymity is important because we don't know who knows whom," said David Lee, director of the university's Anatomy Bequest Program. In other words, no medical student should discover that the cadaver in his or her anatomy class used to be a neighbor or relative. Such anonymity is required by federal law, as it is in most countries - including Germany, where Body Worlds is based. And donors or their families must be carefully informed about exactly what will happen to their bodies after death, Lee said. As demand for human tissue for medical uses and research has grown in recent years, so have the horror stories about how private tissue banking companies trade in human body parts for research.

There is little state or federal scrutiny of body donations for education and research, which is why advanced informed consent is critical to the success of reputable donation programs.

"To entrust someone you love into the care of someone else requires a great deal of trust that we are going to do the right things," Lee said. "We take that very seriously."

The University of Minnesota receives about 170 to 180 bequeathed bodies a year, not nearly enough to meet the number of requests for research specimens. A committee oversees which medical research organizations can have access to them, and only a few approved local ones are allowed to remove specimens from the university for study.

On average, the specimens are good for about 18 months, Lee said. Then the remains are cremated and returned to their families, as they are with the Mayo Clinic's donation program. The primary purpose of the university's bequest program is to provide medical students their first introduction to the human body in anatomy class.

"We all think about it, and anticipate what it will be like," said Paul Schaefer, 36, a first-year medical student who took the class last fall. It was a much more visceral experience than he expected, he said. He was struck by the tensile strength of nerves. "You can pull on one and it won't give way," he said. "You have no concept that the body is built that way."

The mission of Body Worlds is to offer laypeople a similar close-up view of what lies beneath the skin. But these bodies have an entirely different kind of life after death. They are plastinated, a time-consuming process that Von Hagens invented, which replaces all the water in the body with silicone, creating a cadaver that lasts indefinitely.

And Von Hagens has sometimes pushed his mission to share anatomy with the public beyond the comfort level of many: When he was first promoting his exhibits in 1995, Von Hagens put some of his plastinated specimens on a bus - including one of a pregnant woman - and toured Berlin.

Medical ethicists say that kind of display is fine as long as donors and their families know ahead of time what their bodies might be used for. The Body Worlds donor form specifically states that bodies can be used for science, education - and anatomical art. For example, a lithe female archer is posed with a drawn bow and her brain perched on top of her head. A man in a straw hat stands with his muscles splayed out like giant wings. A kneeling woman tosses plasticized birds into the air.

Von Hagens said that he now allows donors to request that their bodies be preserved in specific poses, though there is no guarantee. In this way, he said, he honors their gift. Ethicists agree.

"It's wonderful if people can choose their positions, as long as it's ... an aesthetic that's not offensive," said Mary Faith Marshall, a professor at the university's Center for Bioethics.

Von Hagens says more than 6,000 people have signed up to be donors, several hundred of them from the United States. He started his body donor program in this country in 2004 when it first opened at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. One of the first to sign up was Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California museum.

"I was touched by how much the exhibit works to educate people, and inspires their interest in science," he said. "Why not use my body for that purpose, as well? I won't have a lot of use for it then."

http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2006/06/07/features_gohealthy-07hedonatebody-06-07.html

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