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Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
Broadway
March 2006
240 pages ISBN: 0767917332 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"You are a little soul carrying around a
corpse."--Epictetus "Wherever the corpse is,
there the vultures will follow." -- Matthew 24:28
Body Brokers is an audacious,
disturbing, and compellingly written investigative expose 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.
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