Postmortem, Ep. 5: A reckoning

Last Seen

WBUR

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

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Episode 5 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, reporter Ally Jarmanning digs deeper into the "legitimate" realm of body-parts collecting ⁠— museums ⁠— and asks the burning question: How different is this from the world of Jeremy Pauley in his basement or Cedric Lodge seizing a financial opportunity at Harvard's morgue.

At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, she takes us through displays of skeletons and sometimes-troubling human specimens. What comes up here and at museums around the country ⁠— did the people who used to belong to these bodies ever imagine themselves in a jar, or on a shelf? Did they give permission for decades of gawking?

After all this reporting, Jarmanning examines the ethics of it all, probing how we should treat the dead, and who gets to decide. And she returns us to Harvard, where hardly anyone, except Lodge, has been held to account.

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

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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.
0:39.0	W-B-U-R Podcasts? Boston.
0:44.0	When I told people I was working on a project about the thefts at the Harvard Medical School
0:52.2	Morg and would be diving into the world of human remains, buyers, and sellers,
0:57.0	I got a couple of standard reactions.
1:00.0	The first more common one went like,
1:03.6	Ew, gross, what?
1:06.8	But some others told me, you're writing about dead bodies?
1:10.6	You have to visit the Mooder Museum. I've never heard of the Mooter so I looked it up.
1:16.6	The museum is part of one of the oldest professional medical organizations in the country
1:21.6	and it's housed in a big brick building in downtown Philadelphia. in the Museum. Online reviews call it a strange and beautiful place and
1:34.4	fascinatingly bizarre, but also horrifying and exploitative.
1:39.2	I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the Mooter, it's unlike any museum I've been in before.
1:47.0	It doesn't look like a museum at all.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WBUR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WBUR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.