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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 practices—from 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.
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
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(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 ...
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