Everyone that you will be dissected willfully donated their bodies when they were alive or their families

donated after they passed away. This is an anatomy class at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

It's not a morbid curiosity to learn of what was inside of us or to work with a dead person.

A professor is briefing a classroom full of anxious students in blue scrubs.

They are about to embark on a right of passage, their first dissection of a human cadaver.

If you hit that perfect layer, then it just pulls out. dissection of a human cadaver.

If you hit that perfect layer, then it just pulls right back.

See now, there's kind of that little bit of white there,

that connective tissue.

We learn about how human bodies work

by studying dead ones. and not just in the classroom

researchers use cadavers to study chronic illnesses medical device makers use them

to test out new tools the military blows them up to measure its

explosives. Science, education, and technology all rely on a steady stream of

cadavers.

And a lucrative for-profit industry

has arisen to fill the demand.

Last year alone we placed more than 45,000 anatomical specimens for research, training and education in 50 countries worldwide.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network,

this is the Economics of Everyday Things.

I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, part one of a special two-part story,

Cadavors. To understand how Cadavors became a commodity, you have to go back a few hundred years to a time

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