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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2006, 240 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2007, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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From the book
jacket: 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
characters who are willing to employ
questionable practicesfrom deception
and outright theft -- to acquire,
market, and distribute human bodies and
parts. .... 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.
Comment: Investigative journalist
Cheney's book began as an award-winning
article in Harper's Magazine in 2004. In
this full length book she leaves no
stone (or should that be bone) unturned
- such as traveling to the banqueting
rooms of up-market hotels where
companies such as Johnson & Johnson hold
training seminars using flash-frozen
corpses, and visiting a crematorium
where the unscrupulous owner cuts up
bodies scheduled for cremation and
packages the pieces for resale,
irrespective of what the person died of.
Then there is the other side of the
story, the patients who have lost their
lives due to infections from the body
parts used to treat them, for example a
patient who dies because his knee
surgery used transplanted bone tissue
from an infected cadaver.
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.
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This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2006, and has been updated for the
March 2007 edition.
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