The Body Boom

Although it is essential to studying the secrets of life, dissection of the dead was anathema to laymen for many centuries. Emperors and popes once forbade the practice, forcing physicians to utilize the services of body snatchers who, as late as the 19th century, obtained cadavers in midnight graveyard forays. One British ghoul, William Burke, was hanged in 1829 for creating instant specimens out of innocent wayfarers. As late as the 1960s, medical schools relied upon unclaimed bodies and found even these in short supply.

No more. Tens of thousands of Americans in recent years have decided to bequeath their bodies to science. The result is a body boom that is leaving schools and research labs in some parts of the country with more cadavers than they can dissect.* Medical schools in Illinois, which plan to use 360 bodies this year, have 390 on hand already and applications from 29,000 people who want to cooperate when the time conies. Ohio State University School of Medicine, which uses about 80 a year, has a stockpile of 127. The University of Wisconsin Medical School, which uses fewer than 60 a year, has 5,000 potential donors on file. U.C.L.A., with a list of 10,000 names, no longer accepts offers. Some centers have such an abundance that they accept only bodies in "good" condition.

The main reason for the surprising surplus is changing attitudes toward death and funerals. Many people are no longer concerned about religious strictures that bear on treatment of the dead. There is also a sense of altruism among the donors. Randy Beck, 22, a student and former football player at the University of California at Los Angeles, says: "I've willed my body to science because after I'm done with it I won't have any use for it. There is no excuse to limit the usefulness of my body to my lifetime." Some also decide in favor of dissection as a reaction to the expense and emotional upheaval of traditional burial rites. "My mother's funeral was more like a circus than a day of reflection on death," says Mrs. Joyce Winslow, 25, of Los Angeles. "I want more to come out of my death than just bills." In choosing which institution will inherit their remains, most people pick one with which they have been associated. But whim is also a factor. A New York writer selected Harvard, he quips, because his parents always wanted him to go there and "this is the only way I could get in."

Every state now has a law making it easier for people to donate their bodies or organs after death. In many states, anyone over 18 can, in the presence of witnesses, will his body or its parts to science; in many cases, would-be donors are given identification cards to carry in their wallets. If they die naturally--so that no autopsy is required--their bodies are automatically turned over to recipient institutions.

Some groups, including Orthodox Jews, still oppose both post-mortem examinations and dissection, but most Reform and Conservative Jews favor the idea, as do many Roman Catholics. "Our only consideration is that a body be buried after use," says Bishop John Ward of Los Angeles. "Whether or not a person donates his organs or, indeed, his entire body to science is, of course, a very personal matter in which we would not want to interfere." Nor do undertakers object to the trend. Many are retained by medical schools to store or transport bodies, and have enough traditional patrons to keep them busy.

* New York City is an exception; medical schools there report a shortage of suitable cadavers. Nationwide, there is still a dearth of organs for transplants, such as kidneys.

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