|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
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 Brokers, by Annie Cheney |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Sunday, 26 March 2006 |
Review by MARY ROACH
March 26, 2006
One of the worst things about being dead is the company a person may have to keep. Annie Cheney's investigative shocker, "Body Brokers," introduces us to a vast underground network of cadaver-handling creeps. Meet the greed-infected "body broker" who parcels out a university's surplus willed bodies to private concerns, making, in one spectacularly repellent case, $18,210 from the sale of human fingernails and toenails. Say hello to the crematory owner who takes families' money to cremate their loved ones' bodies but instead sells them to a broker. Shake hands with the corrupt morgue assistant who cleans up after autopsies and pockets a few body parts to sell on the side.
While the news media have covered isolated incidents of corruption, Cheney — with this book and the Harper's magazine article that spawned it — exposes the unsettling scope and seeming ubiquity of human-body-part profiteering. Her tireless legwork (sorry, bad word) and cheerful doggedness will, we can hope, lead to legislation or at the very least a more vigilant attitude among those who contract with these brokers.
The first half of "Body Brokers" unspools the case of the California crematorium owner Michael Brown. Brown's ovens began gathering dust in 1999, shortly after he met Augie Perna, the owner of a company that set up cadaveric-training seminars for surgeons and medical-equipment manufacturers. Rather than cremating the bodies that families brought to him, Brown began selling them off, piecemeal, to Perna and others. Meanwhile, he was having an affair with his partner in crime, 18-year-old Jennifer Bittner. She confessed the affair to her son's father, who confronted Brown in a rage and insisted she quit her job. She did, considered blackmailing Brown and ended up at the county coroner's office where she spilled the beans.
Does it sound as though I've switched books in midreview, abandoning the hard-hitting exposé for a soft-core potboiler? I can't help it, because "Body Brokers" reads like both. It's a bit of a disarticulated body itself. Cheney's opening scene of a laparoscopic urology seminar — with a surgeon reaching into a torso "like a tentative magician" — reflects the literary poise that got her into the pages of Harper's. A couple of chapters later, we are reading about how Brown "laid his eyes" on Bittner's "soft baby flesh, her long, thick hair, her slightly parted lips, and he saw that she was eager." (The author isn't talking about the eyes in Brown's freezer.)
But I don't fault Cheney for the book's narrative juice. "Body Brokers" speeds along like a circular saw through a thigh joint. It's a zippy, entertaining read, and more formal, scholarly works on the topic are not. Like Jessica Mitford's "American Way of Death," this book's combination of readability and investigative firepower will, one hopes, draw the broad readership and outrage needed to instigate change.
My one quibble is that Cheney sometimes falls prey to that very human tendency to think of cadavers as people. She seems indignant, for example, over the use of donor pelvises in a laparoscopic gynecological surgery training seminar. "It is a rare woman who would expose herself in this way to strangers," she writes. But disarticulated torsos are not women (and gynecological surgeons are not simply strangers). Cadavers — or cadaver parts — don't feel embarrassment or pain, and that is precisely the gift they offer us. They endure the unpleasant necessities of medical research with no emotional or physical anguish. They're dead.
The impropriety in these cases has to do with consent — or rather, lack of it — and it has to do with ill-gotten gain. Brokers and corrupt crematory or mortuary workers are profiting illegally — often obscenely — from donated bodies, or stealing parts from bodies slated for cremation or burial. The impropriety does not have to do with how donated bodies are prepared or what they are used for, as ghastly as these things can sound. Cheney herself, in passing, makes a potent case for the importance of surgical seminars: "During nearly 10 hours of torso work, the doctors had successfully performed nephrectomies, both hand-assisted and laparoscopic; some had even removed the prostate laparoscopically, an incredibly challenging operation. They had learned how to sew and cut and cauterize tissue, manipulating their instruments through minute incisions." Let's clean up the body-parts business, but let's also recognize its worth.
Mary Roach is the author of "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" and "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26roach.html?_r=1&oref=slogin |
|
