Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
by Annie CheneyAn audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of a little known aspect of the "death care" world: the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts.
Body Brokers
is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of a
little known aspect of the "death care" world: the lucrative business of
procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts.
Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find
their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by
buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs
and tissue meant for transplantation, these "body brokers" capitalize on the
myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever:
commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies
and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse
used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000.
As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course
of three years, when there's that much money to be made with no federal
regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are
willing to employ questionable practicesfrom deception and outright theft -- to
acquire, market, and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New
York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and
supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons.
In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people
he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in
profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where
fresh torsos are delivered in large coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room
normally used for banquets. "That torso that you're living in right now is just
flesh and bones. To me, it's a product," says the New Jersey-based broker
presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the
"resurrectionists" of the 19th century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney
chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home,
crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities.
Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way
of death, Body Brokers is a captivating work of first-person reportage.
Chapter 1
Wilderness
Joyce Zamazanuk knew that her son was dying. She knew it when
the nurses quietly wheeled Jim to a private room on the seventh
floor of the hospital in San Diego. His new room had a bed, a
metal chair, and an oxygen tube, but little else. Outside, few
visitors wandered the halls. A hush hung over the nursing
station. Joyce thought, This must be where they bring the
sick patients to die.
Six days in the hospital had done little to help Jim. AIDS had
ravaged his body. The tumor that engulfed his lungs appeared
larger in each new CAT scan. Always slender, Jim Farrelly,
forty-five, was now reedlike beneath the cotton sheets and
blankets. His thick brown hair had thinned to a soft, downy fur.
He had trouble talking. Death by asphyxiation was certain.
Joyce wondered what awaited her beloved son: Would he feel pain
in the moment of his passing? How much ...
Cheney's investigations of both the reputable and crooked dealers create a fascinating but decidedly morbid work that covers some of the same ground as Mary Roach's Stiff - but digs deeper into the shady side of the American trade in body parts...continued
Full Review
(266 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
I have carried a donor card for more than 20-years and plan to always do so - but, I have to say that Body Brokers has given me pause for thought. I anticipated that if my body was no longer needed by me that it could be of help to other people, but now that it looks like I could simply be handing it over to be sold to the highest ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Body Brokers, try these:
A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country's most famous museum of medical oddities
Fortey introduces the reader to the extraordinary people, meticulous research and driving passions that helped to create the timeless experiences of wonder that is Londons Natural History Museum.
It is always darkest just before the day dawneth
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!