The ‘adventure’ of the body through time, as seen in previous essays, does not end with death. While the person inside no longer controls the body, the ‘shell’ can still be used, to help others. Today, this is done through body donation. Body donation is vital to the practice of medicine today and, by extension, to today’s society.
The picture above depicts an anatomy class taking place at the University of Sydney, during the 1960s. Here, donated bodies are used as tools for teaching anatomy to medical students. These bodies are a valuable source of information and opportunity for practice. As can be seen in the picture, great care is taken and measures are put in place to ensure the most is taken out of each donation. Such measures include the use of lab coats, hygiene standards, order and discipline, and guidance from the teacher standing in front of the class. As the subject of body donation is highly controversial, students are taught to respect the gift imparted to them and treat it accordingly.
This was not always the case: as we are about to see, such rules were not always in place, with unethical practices being observed throughout history.
The teaching of anatomy has for centuries been done through the use of human dissection (Magee, 2001 in Ghosh, 2015). While the means of procuring cadavers used to be ethically questionable, such as executed criminals (Hildebrandt, 2008), unclaimed bodies (Jones, 2012) or, as seen in the previous essay, body snatching, in recent history legislation has been put in place to aid medical facilities meet quotas, such as body donation programs. These serve to provide enough cadavers for teaching and experimentation while maintaining ethical standards.
Anatomical dissections were regularly open to the public throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (Ghosh, 2015:160). Due to the fact that these events were associated with great dishonour in the mind of the people, the threat of dissection was used as scare tactic to prevent citizens from committing serious crimes (Hildebrandt, 2008:6). One such case, where legislation was put in place to aid in the matter, is the ‘Murder Act of 1752’, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain. This so-called ‘Murder Act of 1752’ stated that some other extrinsic form of prevention needed to be added to dissuade potential criminals, preventing the bodies of murderers from being buried, and “mandating either public dissection of “hanging in chains” of the cadaver” (Murder Act of 1752). The act was only fully repealed in 1973, with individual sections being repealed or amended by subsequent acts.
While most other governments had shifted from the use of executed bodies to other means (Hildebrandt, 2008:6) throughout the 18th century, Great Britain had a different situation. with the legislation not being in place at the beginning of the 19th century. Due to the growing movement to stop the death penalty, supply of bodies for research and teaching had become in short suply, and a response was needed to the wave of body snatchers who were raiding gravesites to meet demand for fresh corpses (Ghosh 2015:161). This response from the British Government came in the form of the Anatomy Act of 1832. The Act provided those studying anatomy with legal access to the unclaimed corpses of those who had died in prison or in workhouses. Jones (2012) argues that this defined, in effect, poverty as the main, in not sole, criterion for human dissection, as these populations were in majority composed of the poor. For medical schools it meant that they could use poor and unclaimed bodies for anatomical dissection but could not use the bodies of the executed.  As a result of this, cadavers provided through body snatching because unnecessary, as the demand for bodies was met by the unclaimed poor from workhouses and charitable hospitals (Mitchell et al., 2011). As around 90% of those who were sentenced to death would later have their sentence reduced (Hitchcock & Shoemaker, 2006:238 in Michell et al., 2011) this act saw the de facto abolition of capital punishment.
Although the process of human dissection was legislated more and more vigorously, many examples of unethical uses of the human body after death can be found in recent history. During the Nazi regime, many political opponents of the Nazi party were imprisoned and executed; the cadavers would be used for research by scientists such as Professor Dr Hermann Voss. Others such as Professor Dr Eduard Pernkopf or Professor Dr Julius Hallervorden were known to have gathered ‘specimens’ for their experiments from victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme or executed Jewish individuals. Atrocities such as these were unearthed and judged during the Nuremberg medical trial (Seidelman, 1996).