Content area
Full text
In a provocatively titled article in the September 1956 American Mercury, Alma Merrick Helms recounted her discovery that death was very expensive. Visits from a salesman hawking burial plots in the local cemetery and her own outing to a nearby mausoleum with marbled halls filled her with dread. But one day a headline grabbed her attention: “Wealthy widow wills cornea.”1 Helms learned that a small child—sightless from birth—would soon be able to see for the first time because of the widow’s bequest to the Eye Bank. “If her eyes are good for something after death maybe a whole body would be worth even more.”2 After learning of the acute shortage of bodies for anatomical study and on the advice of her doctor, she wrote to Stanford Medical College volunteering her body and securing the necessary legal forms. She joked that she had always wanted to matriculate to Stanford, and she was delighted to receive “a charming letter” from the professor of anatomy thanking her for the gift and wishing her a long life. She concluded “I know where I am going. It won’t cost me a penny and it may be the most generous act of my career. Perhaps an embryonic medic will save the life of a child because of what he has learned on me. Could any future be more challenging?”3
By the mid-1950s in states like California, formal body donation programs had begun to supplant the decades-long reliance on the anatomy acts that made the bodies of the indigent and unclaimed available for medical education and research. By the mid-1980s, nearly all American medical schools relied on voluntary anatomical gifts of dead bodies. How formal, legalized, and bureaucratized programs whereby an American adult could register their intention to donate their body after death quickly superseded the reliance on the laws regarding the unclaimed dead—and other less formal, illegal, and transgressive methods of acquiring anatomical material—is the subject of this address and part of our larger book project.4
We make the following interventions. First, since the early nineteenth century, whether by a formal instrument such as a will or codicil, or via a suicide note, directing the body to a doctor, hospital, or medical school— although it has...