-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Working with cadavers in an anatomy lab is often a humbling and monumental moment in a doctor’s career. Students spend hours toiling over dead bodies with gratitude and reverence for the donation that allows them to practice and learn about human anatomy in their journey to become healers. Only, sometimes, these cadavers are not truly donated — and the dead person never consented to have their body dismembered.
When a dead person’s next of kin cannot be located or their family cannot afford a funeral, the responsibility of what to do with the remains falls to the state or county. In these cases, unclaimed bodies are sometimes sent to and accepted by medical schools , but several experts in the field object to the practice, raising ethical concerns that these people never consented to being dissected in life. Related How dead is "dead enough"? Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020, one medical student shared her experience finding out that her first patient was in fact an unclaimed body after she had already sliced into him with a scalpel.
“I still grapple with the guilt of having dissected a man who may have wanted to rest in peace,” she wrote. "The use of somebody's body, even after their death, without their consent is in tension with many of our commonly accepted norms of best ethical practices in medicine." There is no central database to count how many unclaimed dead bodies are reported each year national.
