Postmortem, Ep. 4: The anatomy lab

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WBUR

True Crime, Missing, Mystery, Boston, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As haunting as the Harvard morgue scandal is, you don't have to go back very far in history to find practices for sourcing bodies that would be shocking today. Reporter Ally Jarmanning finds that for more than a century, medical schools relied on grave robbing and body snatching to supply anatomical dissection classes.

In Episode 4 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, she talks to medical school professors and historians about this grim reality, shedding light on how new the notion of ethics in this field is. And we hear from an FBI agent who's investigated the world of body brokers.

If you have questions, comments or tips about this story, you can reach us at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Must remember do not forget
0:08.0	remind me to bring photo ID
0:11.0	reminder set babe can you make sure I don't forget Photo ID. Reminder, set.
0:13.0	Babe, can you make sure I don't forget my photo ID when I vote?
0:17.0	All right, love.
0:20.0	However you remember, you'll need photo ID to vote on the 2nd of May.
0:24.1	Find out more at Electoralcommission.org. UK slash voter ID.
0:28.9	A heads up. This episode can get graphic at times. We're talking about dead bodies here.
0:36.2	Take care while listening.
0:38.8	W-B-U-R Podcasts. Boston. I'm in a bright white windowless room at
0:49.0	I'm in a bright white windowless room
0:52.0	at Quinnipiac University's Neder School of Medicine.
0:56.3	And in front of me on a stainless steel table is a dead body.
1:00.3	A woman, at least that's what I'm told. I can't see her. The body is encased in an opaque white plastic bag. I call it a body bag, and I'm quickly corrected.
1:11.0	No, we don't call it body bags.
1:13.6	We call them donor bags, donor receptacles.
1:17.8	Jesse Gomes is the head of the anatomical gift program.
1:21.2	He's the one who coordinates the body donations from signing folks up to
1:25.1	hand delivering the cremated remains to their families. And he's quick to
1:29.6	correct my language at my request because for Jesse and his coworkers the respect they give to the people
1:36.1	who donated their bodies starts with the words that they use.
1:40.1	Yeah they are donors when they come here. They've given us their donation, essentially.
	...

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