Over the years, we’ve heard Qanon believers loudly protest the alleged misappropriation of human remains – whether they’re being used to supply “adrenochrome farms” or consumed during satanic cabal dinner parties. As is often the case, the reality is far more disturbing than the conspiracy theory. This week, Allie Mezei joins us to bring us horrific tales from the real ‘tissue trade’, a feud between the bodies of the living and the dead that stretches all the way back to the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the corpse trade is very much alive, even today, and continues to be a depressing reminder of the ruling class’s war against the poor.
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Written by Allie Mezei https://twitter.com/pinealdecalcify
Music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
SOURCES:
https://www.alreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Dotson-Complaint.pdf
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/01/11/us/alabama-prison-inmates-missing-organs-lawsuit/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/massachusetts-bill-allowing-prisoners-donate-organs-reduced-time/story?id=96989325
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9996393/
https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2024/01/alabama-still-cant-find-heart-missing-from-prisoners-body.html
https://abc3340.com/news/local/family-says-organs-including-brain-missing-from-deceased-inmate-body-in-noticeable-state-of-decomposition-adoc-uab-st-clair-county
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3162231/
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/pre-1800/comparative-anatomy-andreas-vesalius/#:~:text=Right%2C%20Vesalius%20found%20that%20the,not%20seven%20as%20Galen%20claimed.
Peter Linebaugh, the Tyburn Riots Against the Surgeons in Albion’s Fatal Tree https://www.versobooks.com/products/2212-albion-s-fatal-tree
Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute https://books.google.com/books?id=NEuthk74yG0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/journeytyburn
https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24794
https://scholarworks.harding.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1139&context=tenor
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-bodies/
https://nfda.org/news/media-center/nfda-news-releases/id/7475/congress-takes-significant-step-to-regulate-body-brokers
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4275?s=1&r=29
Welcome, listeners, to the 264th chapter of the QAA Podcast, the Corpse Trade episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Allie Mezzi, and Travis View.
QAnon followers are often fixated on the commodification of the human body.
You can see this when they talk about adrenochrome, or human trafficking, or even the idea that Planned Parenthood is making purses out of fetuses.
But that's one that shows up occasionally.
While a lot of these scenarios are greatly exaggerated or flat-out made-up, these theories are a funhouse mirror that distorts an actual disturbing reality involving missing organs, dismembered cadavers, and questionable procurement practices of human remains.
So, to learn more about this, we brought on our longtime legal correspondent, Ali Massey, who has brought us the grimdark tale that stretches back hundreds of years of how people have, you know, plundered corpses for, you know, whatever reason.
So, Ali, can you please take it away?
On November 16th, 2023, 43-year-old Brandon Clay Dotson was found dead in Ventress Correctional Facility in Barber County, Alabama.
After his family was alerted to his death by the prison, Mr. Dotson's mother and his daughter spent days attempting to collect his remains so that they could hold a funeral.
According to the complaint filed by Dotson's estate in federal court, Mr. Dotson's body was returned to them a week later in a state of severe decomposition.
Concerned that there may have been foul play involved in Mr. Dotson's death or the handling of his remains, the family retained an autopsy pathologist from the complaint they filed.
The Alabama Department of Corrections, or an agent responsible for conducting the autopsy and transporting the body to his family, had inexplicably and without the required permission of Mr. Dotson's next of kin, removed and retained Mr. Dotson's heart.
Brandon Dotson's heart is still missing.
Oh, no.
Yeah, it's pretty bleak.
According to reporting, Ivana Hojenkiv at the Atlanta Constitution Journal, during a January 5th, 2024 hearing in federal court, five people, the warden of the prison, the commissioner and chief deputy commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the director of the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, and the head of autopsies at University of Alabama, Birmingham, all testified that they did not know what happened to Mr. Dodson's heart or where it might be.
Angelo Dellamana, the director of the State Department of Forensic Sciences, said that in a standard autopsy of an inmate, a prisoner will have their internal organs removed from the body and then they will be sectioned, in which samples are removed for testing regarding cause of death.
The organs will then be placed in a special biohazard bag and returned to the bodily cavity they were taken from.
He couldn't give a reason that these organs wouldn't be returned to the body at the end of the autopsy.
They find out that the guy performing the autopsy is made of straw.
He has partnered with a lion, a man made out of tin, and a young woman who has been kidnapped by a tornado.
Ooh.
Isn't it the scarecrow who says, if I only had a heart?
No, it's the tin man.
I think that one's the tin man.
The scarecrow wants the brain.
Okay, okay.
So I fucked up the whole reference, the analogy, the joke.
It's bad, but we're gonna leave it in.
Well, there is a missing brain later.
Oh really?
Oh no, okay.
I will recycle this joke 35 minutes into the episode.
Mr. Dotson isn't the only inmate to die in an Alabama prison and be returned to his family with their organs gone.
According to reporting by Chris Boyette at CNN, the family of 74-year-old Charles Edward Singleton, who passed away while incarcerated in 2021 in Alabama's Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center, received a similar horrific surprise.
A funeral director informed Mr. Singleton's daughter, Charlene Drake, that Singleton's body arrived at the funeral home in a noticeable state of decomposition, And that his internal organs, including his brain, were all missing.
Jesus.
This, like, reminds me of the scene, um, at the beginning of Arachnophobia, when they send, um, Richard Manley, the photographer, back to, um, the town of Kanaiva, and they open the coffin, and his body is just, like, totally decimated because the-the-the spider, you know, hitched a ride from South America.
Or Venezuela, I believe it's from.
Anyways.
Yeah, it's just gruesome.
It's completely gruesome.
So, what's going on here?
The least nefarious explanation would be gross incompetence and a shameful disregard for the dignity of the incarcerated by the Alabama state prison system.
This is certainly a possibility as prisons are hotbeds of medical neglect and often outright human rights abuses.
It is believable and even likely that the remains were negligently handled during routine autopsies.
But many of those who heard the news about the missing organs suspected something more sinister.
Speculation about what might have happened swirled on social media.
One user posted, These prisons are not even trying to hide what they're doing!
This was responded to by another user who said, In Alabama?
The organ trafficking?
Getting a brain transplant from a prisoner just to keep your loved one alive sounds like a good horror film.
Ironically, I wonder if Jordan Peele's movie Get Out had premiered yet because that's literally the premise and it is a pretty good horror movie.
Another user responded to this saying, "Murdered prisoner found with his organs gone? Organ
harvesting for big bucks, obviously. Some of the darker cyberpunk stuff is starting to come true."
Another user on the site formerly known as Twitter quickly connected the missing organs in Alabama
to proposed legislation in Massachusetts from early 2023, noting, "It seems like there's
some lobby out there that really wants the organs of prisoners, for some purpose."
The reference legislation is an act to establish the Massachusetts Incarcerated Individual Bone Marrow and Organ Program, introduced before the Massachusetts State House by Representatives Carlos Gonzalez and Judith Garcia, both Democrats.
The bill The bill would allow prisoners to shave between two months and a year off their prison sentence if they donated their organs or bone marrow.
After harsh criticism from the public and human rights groups, sponsor Gonzales backtracked and said he would rework the bill to remove the incentives for donating.
Gonzales made a statement to ABC News stating that he never intended to establish a quid pro quo and that the bill had only been created to remove red tape that prevented prisoners from donating organs and marrows to their family members in need.
As of recording, no version of the bill has passed the Massachusetts House.
This is crazy.
So, essentially, they were trying to come up with some kind of program that was like, hey, you want to get out of prison a couple years earlier, a couple months earlier?
Just give us pieces of your body.
Give us a kidney.
Give us your marrow.
This is like something out of Squid Game, you know?
It's like the kind of insidiousness that you only see from corporations in, like, giant movies, but apparently also reality as well.
This is like a Robocop universe nightmare in which, you know, the overclass, you know, they plot to whenever they need a fresh fusion of organs, you know, they round up enough people who are then pressured into giving up what they need in order to, you know, live forever or whatever.
Mr. Dotson's family does not say that they think that his heart was harvested for transplant.
Instead, they allege in their lawsuit against a number of state entities that they believe that Mr. Dotson's heart may have been taken or even sold without his consent for the purpose of use in medical research.
Right now, we do not know what happens, but I believe that suspicion is unfortunately a very realistic one.
In their complaint, Mr. Dotson's family cited a finding by a group of medical students at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, that in 2018, a disproportionate amount of the number of specimens they encountered during their medical training originated from individuals who died in prison.
The medical students found that the wardens of Alabama prisons could sign off on the remains of deceased inmates being used for teaching, education, and research, often without the inmate or their family's consent.
During a November 2018 meeting, a UAB administrator admitted that one-third of the samples in the pulmonary lab came from incarcerated individuals, a wildly disproportionate amount compared to how much of the general Alabama population is in prison, which, according to the Prison Policy Institute, is 938 per 100,000 people.
I do have to say here that as of right now, despite Mr. Dotson's estate's allegations, there is no evidence currently available that the University of Alabama, whatever its policies and practices are, ever handled Mr. Dotson's remains.
UAB denies any involvement in the tragedy and they're trying to get dismissed from the lawsuit.
According to ABC News, Mr. Singleton, the man whose brain was missing, family, claims that UAB performed the autopsy that removed his organs, but UAB has not commented on that allegation.
I hope that Mr. Dotson and Mr. Singleton's families get answers and restitution for the pain and violation they've been made to feel by the state of Alabama and its prison system.
Regardless of what comes to light about what happens here, the family's fears that their loved ones were exploited for the remains is based on literal centuries of appropriation of the bodies of the poor, the incarcerated, and the underclass in the name of medical science and progress.
This real-life horror story is often facilitated and encouraged by the state, and taps into common fears about exploitation and dehumanization.
In the late medieval period in Europe, the understanding of the human body was based not exclusively but still largely on treatises from classical antiquity.
The foremost authority was the work of Galen of Pergamon, a Roman Greek physician who had lived in the 2nd and 3rd century AD.
Galen's scientific writings on human anatomy combined Aristotelian philosophy with observations he made from his own extensive dissections of animals.
Mostly monkeys, dogs, and pigs.
His treatises were full of sharp observations and certainly were the best of their time, but for reasons you might imagine, they were deeply flawed.
Furthermore, because a lot of the writings had been lost when the Western Roman Empire fell, many of the treatises in use in Europe for education were Latin translations of Arabic translations from the original Greek, so that probably negatively impacted the quality of what was on the page.
Yet for over 1,300 years in Europe, and also in much of the Islamic world, Galen's writing remained at the core of medical study, almost entirely unchallenged and unchanged.
The paradigm finally shifted in the 16th century when a Flemish anatomist named Vesalius, working in Padua, published De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Or, on the fabric of the human body, in 1543.
Written to correct and expand on the work of Galen, observations about human anatomy in De Humani Corporis Fabrica were gathered from methodological dissections of human bodies, mostly those of executed criminals.
To illustrate Vasari's state of anatomical understanding caused by a millennia of depending on translations of translations of a guy who literally lived in ancient Rome, here are some of the things that Vesalius discovered and published.
Humans only have one jawbone.
Men and women have the same number of ribs.
The bones in your hands contain marrow.
And skin is not a muscle.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica wasn't perfect, but it was a huge and vital improvement.
And throughout the Western world, it opened the floodgates of advancement in anatomical science.
The next few centuries saw immense progress.
Through empirical study, the understanding of the human body grew by leaps and bounds.
Thus, the path between surgery being a sure death sentence and modern medical science began to be paved in human dissections.
British anatomists first drew the attention of the rest of the Western world in the 17th century with the pioneering work of William Harvey, the first physician to demonstrate that the heart pumped blood through the body and to describe the course of circulation.
In the following 17 and 1800s, British cities like London and Edinburgh became major centers of anatomical research and education.
According to Peter Linebaugh in the 1975 essay, Vitaeburn Riots Against the Surgeons, which I depended on heavily while writing this section, the pre-eminence of British anatomy in the era depended on private teaching schools and hospitals such as St.
George's, St.
Thomas's, and St.
Bartholomew's, pushing advances in the understanding of morphology, pathology, and therapeutics by performing more and more dissections and incorporating autopsy into the standard training of physicians.
William Hunter, an 18th century anatomist and practicing surgeon best known today for his
revolutionary advances in obstetrics, wrote of the necessity of dissection, "It informs the head,
guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity."
The anatomists and surgeons need it remains.
But where would they get them?
Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham encouraged people to volunteer their own remains for the benefit of science.
He not only talked the talk, but upon his 1832 death walked the walk.
Bentham stipulated in his will for his own remains to be dissected at an anatomy lecture.
The body was subsequently mummified and put on display.
But very few of Bentham's 18th and 19th century contemporaries were of a similar mind.
Instead, writes Linebaugh, it appears as though a precondition of the progress in anatomy depended on the ability of surgeons to snatch the bodies of those hanged at Tyburn.
Wait, so these guys were waiting, like, under the gallows, basically, like, with a sack, you know, that the body would just drop into it and they would, you know, run back to their labs?
Oh yeah, they would.
Oh my god.
Linebaugh writes of Tyburn, The engine, as much as the fact of the state's ultimate power, became the theme of scores of Proverbs, riddles, words, and descriptions beating evidence to the facts that London, as an older historian put it, was a quote, city of the gallows, and that its people both recognized this and accommodated themselves to it, but upon their own terms.
The scaffold consisted of three posts, 10 or 12 feet high, held apart by three connecting crossbars at the top.
It stood at Tyburn from the early Tudor period until when a new scaffold was constructed in Newgate.
Tyburn was St.
Tyburn, the three-legged mare, the three-legged stool.
As it bore fruit the whole year round, it was the deadly nevergreen.
To be extremely clear, the fruit was dead people.
The gallows at Tyburn were the primary place of execution for London and Middlesex.
Where criminals from poachers to thieves to rapists to murderers to traitors to the crown were hanged in a public spectacle before massive jeering crowds.
According to the Old Bailey Online, about 1,100 men and 110 women were hanged at Highburn during the 18th century.
The hanging served as a form of social control, a morality play, and a reminder of the massive power of the state to inflict punishment on the lower classes when they got out of line.
And also, entertainment, right?
You would get dressed up and bring the family to go see an execution in the public square.
That was... Oh yeah, and the people who were getting hanged, there was this concept called Dying Game, where you would go up and put on a show at the gallows, where for your last three minutes of being alive, you're doing a stand-up routine up there.
What?
See, it's amazing, you know, I'm always so fascinated by this and, you know, the sort of decreased value of life and perhaps, you know, that goes hand in hand with the society being more overwhelmingly religious and believing in an afterlife that you could go up and, you know, do a stand-up routine, you know, in the face of impending death.
It's just a completely different world and mindset from what we know.
In the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the source of legal remains were the gallows at Tyburn and later Newgate.
The Crown and Parliament facilitated this harvest by granting the College of Barber Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians a small number of convicts' corpses each year.
Also, I just kind of love how barbers and surgeons were the same thing back in the day.
Like, oh, we both need sharp objects.
Same job.
Contemporary intellectuals praised this practice for its utilitarian function.
Bernard de Mandeville, an author best known for his work The Fable of the Bees, wrote in an article in the British Journal.
I have no design that savors the cruelty or even indecency towards a human body, but shall endeavor to demonstrate that superstitious reverence of the vulgar for a corpse, even of a malefactor, and the strong aversion they have against dissecting them, are prejudice to the public.
For as health and sound limbs are the most desirable of all temporal blessings, so we ought to encourage the improvements of physics and surgery.
Such arguments of scientific utility, however, tended to be mixed with unabashed class hatred.
Mandeville further wrote, "Even if the relatives of the dead felt themselves or their
dead relation defiled by this procedure, the dishonor would seldom reach beyond the scum of the
people."
So, don't worry, we're only, you know, looting the- The scum of the earth.
The people we're scraping off the bottom of our shoe.
Not real people.
Jesus Christ.
Not people like you and me.
Yeah.
He felt that thieves who injured the public should be grateful for the opportunity to be anatomized so that they could finally be of some use to society.
The disdain for the criminal classes was even more obvious from the state.
Leinbaugh writes, "Neither the Crown, which granted the bodies of condemned felons to the
physician and the surgeons, nor of a legislature, which strengthened by law the royal grants,
regarded the dissection of felons from the standpoint of science. Far from it, they were
motivated less by the hope of causing health and sound limbs than by the anticipation of dishonor
to the scum of the people." The grants by the Crown and Parliament weren't enough to slake
the anatomists' thirst for bodies.
The College of Barber Surgeons and Royal College were only promised about 10 corpses annually each.
And private medical schools where most of the real anatomical innovation was happening weren't covered by the grants.
So, the surgeons set to purchasing bodies from the hangmen, who they would bribe with regular, lavish gifts for their favor, and would also purchase bodies from the condemned themselves.
Agents of the anatomists would loiter outside Newgate Prison where the condemned waited to be brought to the gallows, and would offer them money in exchange for their remains.
Many took the offer.
Some had debts to settle for their families.
Others wanted money to purchase fine food, alcohol, and sex work with in their last days, or even to buy nice clothes to die in.
That is so messed up.
It's like, hey, you are about to not need any of this in approximately 48 hours.
Would you like this sack of gold in exchange for your eyeballs?
You can be blackout drunk until you're gone with this.
I mean, that does sound attractive.
It's tempting.
It is tempting.
If I could interject while we're on the topic of all this hanging, have you guys ever seen the movie Pierpoint?
I think that's what it's called.
I have not seen it.
It stars Timothy Spall, and it is about the last great hangman in Britain.
And if you're a morbid, curious person... If you're a fan of Capital Punishment...
Yeah, and a morbid curious person like myself.
That is a really kind of in-depth look at Capital Punishment in the, I believe it's the 1800s?
I'm not totally sure.
But it's called Pure Point.
It's with Timothy Spall.
It's kind of an under-known film.
And if that kind of stuff interests you, I suggest that you check it out.
You know, I'll probably check it out.
I mean, Timothy Spall.
I mean, he's a good actor.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
So I don't think any of you will be surprised to learn that the common people of London fucking hated the anatomists that came to harvest bodies from the scaffolding.
Linebaugh recounts an anecdote of a man named John Hill, who was sentenced to hang in 1744.
On the morning of his execution, as Hill exited the chapel at Newgate Prison to be escorted to the gallows, he noticed a gentleman looking at him.
He asked the man, Do you know me?
No friend, replied the gentleman.
I suppose, said Hill.
You are some kind of surgeon, and if I had a knife in my hand, I would slit you down the nose.
Already at the mercy of a legal system that many saw as draconian arbitrary and at the threat of execution for even minor crimes, the lower classes saw anatomization as a final outrage against them by their society's elite.
And in response to this outrage, they would riot, not usually to stop the execution, but to save the bodies of the condemned from the clutches of the surgeons.
Author Samuel Richardson described one such riot that he witnessed in 1740.
As soon as the poor creatures were half dead, I was much surprised before such a number of peace officers to see the populace fall to hauling and pulling the carcasses with so much earnestness as to occasion several warm recounters and broken heads.
These were the friends of the persons executed and some sons sent by private surgeons to obtain bodies for dissection.
The contents weaned these were fierce and bloody and frightful to look at.
So yeah, when the misurgeons were snatching the bodies below the gallows, crowds would rush them and start trying to just beat the crap out of them.
And they would fight over the corpses.
Well, I mean, that makes sense to me in a certain way because, you know, once, you know, not even taking into account the severity of the crime, but once somebody was executed, they were innocent.
I mean, they had paid the price.
They paid the ultimate price, you know, for whatever they had done.
And, you know, I could see you know, family members and friends, you know, believing
that the dissection or even just the sort of carting away of the body by people who they didn't
know, you know, these sterile doctors and surgeons as further punishment. So that sort of makes
sense to me. Absolutely. The composition of the rioting crowds at Tyburn indicates that there was no
great separation in sympathy between the broader working class of the time and their society's
criminal elements.
Linebaugh writes, "The surgeons and physicians called their opponents at the gallows 'loose
and disorderly persons.' To Mandeville, they were the 'scum of the people.'"
To the newspapers that reported the disturbances, they were simply the mob.
Those to whom the felons appealed for help, and those actually initiating the battle for possession of the corpse, can conveniently be described by five kinds of solidarities.
The family.
The personal friends.
Fellow workers.
The Irish and sailors.
Though, as we shall see, these particular divisions were often transcended in the general passion of struggle.
Why do the Irish get their own category?
It's like, you know all those Irishmen, they wait outside the dollars.
They're waiting to grab the bodies.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, the essay has a bunch of examples of these connections.
For instance, friends and family of the condemned would pool money to outbid the surgeons and purchase the body from the hangman.
And when that failed, they would riot.
Brickmakers' guilds, bargemen's associations, and throngs of coachmen would show up to protect members of their own profession who had committed crimes and were sentenced to hang.
And as you said, the Irish.
The Irish were disproportionately represented among those who died at Tyburn, and crowds of 40 to 50 Irishmen would gather to snatch their countrymen's remains from the surgeons and ensure them a proper Catholic burial.
One of the most interesting stories to me was that of a Scottish sailor named James Buchanan, like the terrible United States president, same name, different guy, who was hanged at a naval gallows in 1738 for murder after he stabbed his ship's fourth mate, arguably in self-defense.
Arguably.
From Linebaugh.
As it tends to be.
The stereotypical hanging weather.
It ordered the sheriff to mobilize a strong force and asked the parochial officers of
Wapping to maintain order with a competent and sufficient guard.
The weather was bitter on the day of the hanging.
As it tends to be.
The stereotypical hanging weather.
Oh yeah.
Hanging weather.
The weather was bitter on the day of the hanging.
The wind came out of the northeast.
Snow had begun to stick on the warehouse gables, and ice formed at the river's edge by the
A vast crowd of sailors assembled upon the quays and in the wearies and lighters in the river.
On the scaffold, Buchanan usurped the prerogative of the ordinary of Newgate.
He conducted the service from the Presbyterian paraphrase and then led the throng in singing the 23rd Psalm.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
For thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
The sheriffs, tip staffs, watch, and constabulary could not assure the delivery of his body to the surgeons.
Some sailors got on the scaffold and endeavored to cut him down, on which a scuffle ensued.
But many other sailors coming to the assistance of those who first made the attempt, he was cut down, and his body carried off with loud acclamations of joy, accompanied by a great many sailors.
In the years following this incident, rumors arose that Buchanan had actually survived his meeting with the hangman's noose and was still alive.
But yeah, just completely crazy story.
You know, you go up there, you do the 23rd Psalm, and then, you know, you drop and all hell breaks loose.
And of course, we are still dealing with this, of people who, in some cases, have seen perish with our own eyes, or well documented by the various multiple media reports, and people still believe, no, no, no, they survived, they survived and they're still alive, and they're biding their time, and they're going to do something, something, something, Trump.
Hey man, I saw JFK at that football game, and Michael Jackson at Wendy's.
Incredible.
Okay.
Not from personal experience or anything.
I saw it with my own two eyes. He took one bite of the Baconator and was sick for 48 hours,
thus preventing him from recording a podcast episode with Julian."
Incredible.
Okay. Not from personal experience or anything. It's a different Julian.
By the middle of the 18th century, these riots posed a problem not only for the
anatomists being denied bodies, but for the ruling class as a whole.
The spectacle of execution was supposed to be a means of social control, by which fear of the state was impressed into the populace by public displays of violence against those who deviated from the imposed order.
Instead, those hangings were becoming a stage for that very populace to defy the wishes of their social bettors.
If the various apparatuses of the state, such as the city guard, couldn't project enough power to prevent handfuls of hooligans from rising up and saving a body from anatomization, what power would they have in the face of a real widespread social uprising?
And maybe people were beginning to notice.
These tensions hit ahead with the disturbances at the execution of Basavirn Penles in 1749.
In July of that year, throngs of rowdy sailors returning from the War of Jenkins' Ear incited a days-long riot on the Strand in London, ultimately setting a number of large fires and destroying several taverns and body houses.
As the upheaval was winding down, two city watchmen discovered Basavirn Penles, A wig maker who lived across the street from one of the establishments that had been ransacked passed out with an assortment of presumably stolen linens stuffed under his shirt.
He was promptly arrested.
Penliss was tried, not for theft, but for disturbing the peace under the Riot Act, for being feloniously and riotously assembled to the disturbance of the public peace.
In September, he was convicted by a jury on this charge and, despite the jury's recommendation of lenience, sentenced to death along with a number of rioters.
Okay, so just for context, if we lived by these rules today, the guy who went to the middle of Times Square, the streamer, and was, like, giving out PS5s, that guy would have been, like, convicted and hanged.
Well, you have to read the Riot Act first, which is, like, this long paper, and people, um, it doesn't really do anything except, um, if you're still rioting by the end of the guy reading the Riot Act, you get arrested.
Oh my god.
I can't- I'm just imagining, like, people standing around the gallows hoisting up their, you know, their brand new PS5s.
Chat's going, chat's going wild, you know.
They have to put it on slow mode because too many people are, I mean, God.
You can find this getting streamed on Twitch from like eight different angles.
Yeah.
I, on the one hand, I'm not sure we're all that much better as a society.
It's just a little bit sneakier and, and not quite as public, but I also, oh God, if this was, if this was the practice in today, yeah, exactly.
It would be the number one thing streamed on Twitch.
Ugh, I'm just imagining Gallows TikTok.
Oh my god.
With the executioner doing a little dance.
Yeah, let's not give anybody any ideas, okay?
Oh no, we probably have.
So the evidence on which Penliss was convicted was noticeably shoddy.
The star witness against him was a disgruntled innkeeper who was notorious for lying and in the past had been fined for fraud.
And there was a significant doubt that the reading of the Riot Act, which was necessary for a rioting conviction, ever actually happened.
Justice for Penliss became a cause celeb across London with hundreds of people petitioning the King to pardon Penliss or in some other way mitigate his sentence.
All 12 jurors on the original case joined the movement, claiming that they had been misled as to the witness against Penliss's credibility.
No clemency came from the Crown.
The ensuing weeks between Penliss's sentencing and his hanging turned chaotic.
It's best here again to read from Linebaugh.
The Tyburn Fair at which Penliss and 14 others were hanged were fraught with danger.
Crowds had gathered menacingly at the Old Bailey to protest at the imprisonment of other rioting sailors.
In late September, three weeks before the hanging, some of the condemned prisoners sawed through their chains with tools smuggled into them by friends and attempted to break out.
Less than a week before the hanging on 12th October, it was reported that the convicts under sentence of death in Newgate, having got a quantity of gunpowder, chips and other combustibles, conveyed to them, designed to attempt an escape by setting fire to or blowing up part of the said jail.
The plan was discovered, and its perpetrators were placed under heavy guard and chained to the floor.
All accounts of the unusually large crowd in the streets that day stress the prominence of sailors.
At the hanging gathered some thousands of sailors, appearing armed with bludgeons and cutlasses, according to one observer.
With the exception of Penliss, all fourteen men hanged were sailors.
The one woman hanged that day was the daughter of a bar owner.
Uh, who was married to a seaman.
Attempts to rescue the condemned prisoners during the long, crowded procession were widely reported and feared.
Order at the hangings in the year or so preceding that of Penliss was maintained by reliance upon contingents of the foot and horse guards.
A force of over 300 men armed with swords and javelins was deployed against the crowd by the London and Middlesex sheriffs and marshals on the day of the hanging.
Mounted and on foot, the troops formed concentric circles around the gallows at Tyburn.
Lionbaugh writes, The multitude of spectators was infinite.
Though a rescue had been threatened by many, there yet was not the least disturbance, except during a moment at the gallows where a vast body of sailors, some of whom were armed with cutlasses and all with bludgeons, began to be very clamorous as the unhappy sufferer was going to be turned off.
Order was kept, but at a price.
The sheriff avoided a battle at the gallows by taking responsibility for the dead bodies,
which he delivered to the Friends of the Hanged.
The vast body of sailors assembled there to save the bodies from the surgeons left Tyburn without having to fight
against the surgeons.
Penliss was buried in St. Clement's Burial Ground, whose parishioners had raised a subscription for this
purpose.
There are like some quotes from like old British stuff where the phrasing is so awkward.
Yeah.
You know, I had it once explained to me, you know, it's described as old English, but it's actually not.
It's newer English.
This is modern English.
Yeah, the language was newer at that point.
So yeah, interesting stuff.
But Elding was an immature art at this point.
Yeah, I guess like, you know, they didn't have pencils, they just had like, what, like quill ink or whatever?
The fountain pen was something new and exciting?
Yeah.
The Penliss incident marked a major turning point in the relationship between the masses of London, the surgeons, and the ruling classes.
In the following half-decade, when riots seemed imminent, the guards at the hangings would intervene not to help the anatomists secure their bounties, but to prevent the surgeons from appropriating the remains.
In 1752, Parliament passed the Murder Act.
Which both limited the penalty of anatomization to murderers and required all murderers to either be displayed in chains after their execution or be anatomized.
This legislation was designed to relegate the punishment of dissection to only the least sympathetic criminals while also attempting to still ensure a steady supply of remains to the anatomists.
But once again, the corpses of murderers were not enough to sate the demand of the anatomists.
While still taking corpses from the gallows, they'd also solicit grave robbers called Resurrection Men to bring them the freshly deceased.
Some surgeons even commissioned murder to fill their tables.
As in the famous 1828 case of Burke and Hare, when two Scottish innkeepers were caught killing tenants of their Edinburgh boarding house to sell to anatomist Robert Knox.
Killing people to sell their bodies to surgeons became known as birking, and the profitable venture inspired a number of copycats, most notably an entire crime ring that terrorized London in 1831.
The history and social hysteria surrounding resurrection men and birkers are themselves very interesting, but we do not have time to get into them too deeply here.
What a practice to have for your namesake is just murdering and selling the corpses for money.
Birking.
Um, a very funny thing was that, um, because, like, Birk became, like, the namesake of it, when he was eventually tried for what happened, he was sentenced to death, anatomized himself, and I read somewhere that he was turned into wallets for the crowd, like his skin was, yet somehow hair managed to walk free, even though he was just as guilty.
But it's not called hairing.
It was called Birking.
Sounds like Hare was better at public relations.
You know, you may set up Burke to be the fall guy.
Five years later, Hare is in a general store, you know, buying some tonic and he pulls out his wallet to pay.
You know, his buddy with him was like, hey, man, that's that wallet looks pretty familiar.
You didn't get like your old buddy's skin, did you?
And he's like, oh, man, he's kind of embarrassed.
But the wallet is so popular that, you know.
All right.
I don't know where I'm going with this bit.
I think he might have actually gotten murdered by people who, like, recognized him later, but do not quote me on that.
I know I looked up his ultimate fate and it was possibly unsure.
I'll issue a correction.
I'll issue a correction on the site formerly known as Twitter if I find it something different.
I don't think anybody in any of these stories feels like they've got a happy ending.
It's like if you somehow manage to escape the noose, you're certainly not going to escape the angry throngs of barbers and surgeons or, you know, townspeople.
Or just random people who want to clobber someone for fun.
And that was what happened back in those days.
There was a lot more clobbering.
You don't see a lot of clobbering today.
Gotta become a return guy for public violence.
All of these terrible sources of bodies, the anatomists were still short on corpses.
Janet Phillips' essay, Bodies in Bureaucracy, notes that the number of medical students in Edinburgh and London was increasing.
In the 1790s, the number was around 300 across both cities, but by the 1820s, there were over 400 medical students in Edinburgh and almost 1,000 in London.
More students meant more bodies were needed.
Faced with the demands of the medical establishment and the public's agitation over the perceived endemic birking and grave robbing, Parliament acted and in 1832 passed the Anatomy Act, which would serve as a model for legislation about the procurement of human remains for research world-round.
The Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed relatives of the deceased to donate their bodies to science voluntarily.
But more importantly, it gave surgeons and their students legal access to the bodies from workhouses, hospitals, and prisons that remained unclaimed 48 hours after death.
In the Anatomy Act of 1832, the story of body snatching, dissections, and the rise of anatomy, Rebecca Burroughs notes that many terms in the act remained ambiguous, vague, and did not touch upon how the bodies were to be chosen.
Workers at applicable institutions were not required to make the very poor who lived there aware that they were required to affirmatively opt out of anatomization.
The act also did not require that the family of the deceased be located and notified, so their absence could be taken as acceptance for dissection.
That's crazy.
The burden of anatomization, therefore, fell again on an underclass, and this time, an especially friendless and destitute portion of it.
The surgeon's harvesting of the remains transitioned from playing out on the public stage of the execution scaffold to occurring as a quiet, unnoticed interaction in a back alley behind a poorhouse.
Britain's poor, of course, found this horrific.
Burroughs describes how the poor in workhouses began to petition Parliament to revoke the bill because they regarded the bill as a gross violation of the feelings of our poorer brethren and one which encouraged a heartless system of infidelity which would have us repudiate the blessed hope of immortality and place ourselves on a level with the beasts that perish.
Despite these petitions and a handful of smaller riots, nothing in particular changed.
In her seminal work on the topic, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, Ruth Richardson estimates that of the 57,000 bodies dissected within the first hundred years of the Act's implementation, less than half of a percent came from anywhere other than institutions which housed the poor.
In some sense, like it had once been a final punishment for criminals, anatomization and dissection became a sort of final insult for the lower class.
Each culture on this earth has its own unique belief surrounding death and the proper treatment of human remains.
These rituals serve emotional needs for the loved ones of the deceased and in many cases the promise of receiving them after death comforts those who are still alive.
Richardson wrote in Death Dissection and the Destitute that in 18th and 19th century London there exists a widely held belief that a strong tie existed between the remains of a recently deceased individual and their soul for an undefined period after their death.
And that the post-mortem customs and rituals enacted by the friends and family of the deceased could impact the ultimate fate of the deceased's soul.
Contemporary funeral customs, such as holding an in-house wake, washing the dead, and dressing the corpse for the grave, serve to soothe, and I quote, "...that raw nerve of the psyche which finds great difficulty in adjusting to loss, in contemplating death, and in achieving the transition from grief to equilibrium, which treads a faltering path between love and mortal fear."
According to Richardson, because of the meanings and values attached to the customary treatment of the dead in the early 19th century, dissection was not only seen as disrespectful towards the dead, but also the deliberate mutilation or destruction of identity, perhaps for eternity.
The horror of anatomization in the 18th and 19th century is, at least in part, deeply rooted in the dehumanization the process is perceived to entail.
Linebaugh writes, "With the advance in understanding of anatomy and the corresponding development of
private trade and corpses, we can find in the early 18th century a significant change in the
attitude towards the dead human body."
The corpse becomes a commodity with all of the attributes of property.
It could be owned privately.
It could be bought and sold.
A value not measured by the grace of heaven nor the fires of hell, but quantifiably expressed in the magic of the price list, was placed upon the corpse.
Through the buying, the selling, and the trade of remains, either at the gallows or in the poorhouse, or commandeered by a resurrection man or burker, the deceased individual seized in many ways to be a person and became an object to be sold, bought, abused, and disposed of at the whims of others.
And I think that's in large part the horror of what happened to Mr. Dotson and Mr. Singleton.
Already incarcerated, in a situation where they couldn't control their environment.
They were at the mercy of the state.
They died, and then they were further treated in a way that deeply disrespected them and their wishes.
And the wishes of the family left behind to grieve them.
They were people, but not in the eyes of the state apparatus that controlled their fate.
There is something deeply demoralizing about the idea that one is worth less to the powers that be as an individual person with unique thoughts, hopes, and dreams than as an assembly of body parts to be subdivided in souls.
This naturally leads to anxiety that one will be left to die or even be murdered for access to remains.
And I also think that a similar fear is the driving force at the heart of adrenochrome extraction conspiracy theories, where human life and agency are extinguished by an unstoppable cabal of elites, all for access to a wonder narcotic.
It's a tale of transformation of the person into an anonymous, consumable bio-resource against their will, and a narrative of degradation and dehumanization.
So, in my opinion, there is certainly no inherent indignity in having one's body dissected.
Donated human remains are essential for medical education, training, and research.
Medical researchers developing new medicines, instruments, devices, and implants, and other treatments rely on bodies for their work.
Doctors, dentists, nurses, paramedics, and surgeons all need access to human remains to learn how to do their jobs, which save and improve countless lives.
And a lot of people nowadays genuinely like the idea that they can help society after they're gone by donating their remains.
But what matters is that the people, and to some degree their families, donate their bodies to science with informed consent and have done so fully willingly without coercion.
This is a fraught situation for prisoners, and it's also fraught for people who are so poor they cannot afford a cremation or burial.
And that's right, we're going to get to the final section of today's episode.
Today, as a bit of a spiritual successor to the Anatomy Act of 1832, there exists in the United States a troubling and by-large unregulated industry that profits from the donated dead, many of which are individuals that donated their bodies because their families could not afford a burial.
Okay, this is where it gets really fucking grim, by the way.
Alright, as if everything that has come before this wasn't, like, super grim.
It's going to get worse, so, uh, trigger warning, um, if decomposing, uh, de-holified bodies, uh, you know, give you the willies, maybe skip this part, would you say?
Yeah, or listen to it twice.
Yeah, or twice, or three times, or make it your new identity.
Up to you.
This next section relies heavily on the Reuters investigative series, The Body Trade, cashing in on the donated dead, published in 2017 and 2018.
The link to this reporting is in the episode description and I highly recommend listeners read it.
Fair warning, it is pretty gruesome and there is so much screwed up about this industry that what I discuss here is just going to be the tip of the iceberg.
So, through interviews and public records, Reuters identified 34 bodybrokers active across America in the five-year span prior to the publication of their story.
25 of the 34 bodybrokers were for-profit corporations, and the remaining nine operated as non-profits.
Of America's 50 states, in 2018, only New York, Virginia, Oklahoma, and Florida closely tracked donation and sales of human remains.
Data obtained by Reuters under public record laws from those states provide a snapshot of the industry.
Reuters calculated that from 2011 through 2015, private brokers received at least 50,000 bodies and distributed
more than 182,000 body parts.
Florida and Virginia require permits for body sales and the paperwork gives an illustration of the state of the
industry.
A 2013 shipment to a Florida orthopedic training class included 27 shoulders.
A 2015 shipment to a teaching seminar in carpal tunnel syndrome in Virginia included 5 arms.
Listeners might want to know how much body parts cost.
Reuters found that a whole body went for around $3,000 to $5,000, though prices may sometimes exceed $10,000 with market fluctuations.
More often, cadavers are divided into multiple parts.
A body can fetch more dismembered and sold in pieces than it can whole.
The costs of some of these.
$3,500 for a torso with legs, $500 for a head, $350 for a foot, and $300 for a spine.
One of the brokers investigated by Reuters earned at least $12.5 million from their business over the course of three years.
Jesus.
So basically, the price for an entire human body is roughly about the same as getting a really good gaming PC.
If you're getting like a 4090, you know, an RTX 4080, 4090, you're getting an i7 or an i9, you know, a solid SSD, you know, decent quality motherboard, you're paying about the same as these brokers do for a dead corpse.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you really want to upgrade your gaming experience, you know what you have to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're introducing a new sort of liquid cooling apparatus that's made from the internal fluids of a corpse.
I feel terrible making this joke.
I'm going to say I want to cut it out, but I'm going to leave it in.
You know, I don't quite fully understand the economics of this either, because you only have one spine in the body and two feet, yet a single spine that's worth less than a single foot.
Maybe there's more demand for feet.
Like, you know, foot doctors need to practice more.
Hmm.
Yeah, right.
Maybe.
Yeah, those, you know, those cheapo chiropractors, those quack chiropractors, they're not willing to pony up for a spine to practice on.
Dr. Scholz has enlisted the brokerage of 10,000 human bodies to perfect their insole orthopedics.
Oh God.
Dr. Scholl.
Dr. Scholl, otherwise known as Dr. Death.
Dr. Scholl, he's buying up bodies quicker than you could say Joe Biden.
He's buying bodies, he's taking their feet.
It's Dr. Scholl, or we call him Dr. Death.
Not to be confused with the other Dr. Death, Dr. Scholl, much more evil, part of the cabal.
There's a couple of Dr. Deaths.
So these remains do not always stay in the United States.
An investigation by John Shipman and Reed Levinson tracked the sale of a pelvis and legs to a university in Malaysia, feet to medical device companies in Turkey, heads to hospitals in Slovenia and the UAE, and to plastic surgeon training schools in Germany.
Demand for body parts from Americans is especially high in countries where laws or the religious traditions of large portions of the population prohibit the dissection of the dead.
No other nation has both the infrastructure and lack of regulation that enables the collection and sale of corpses in the same way America does.
Reuters found that since 2008, America-based bodybrokers have exported parts of Americans to at least 45 countries, including Italy, Israel, China, Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.
These bodybrokers have also become intertwined with the American funeral industry.
Reuters identified 62 funeral operators and business arrangements with brokers.
The brokers will pay morticians referral fees ranging from $300 to $1,400 for access to remains.
These payments allow morticians to make money preparing the remains of loved ones of families who might not otherwise be able to afford cremation.
These relationships raise conflicts of interest by incentivizing funeral homes to encourage grieving relatives to donate their loved ones' remains, often glossing over or neglecting to inform them about what happens to the corpse.
Sometimes, funeral directors go into the body brokerage business for themselves.
And some states, including Colorado, have tried to stem this practice by making it illegal for the same person to own a funeral home in a body broker business.
But that won't stop the referral scheme described above.
One particularly upsetting story from the investigative series is that of a man named Cody Saunders.
Cody was born in 1992 with multiple severe health problems, including a hole in his heart and failing kidneys.
Over the course of his life, he took over 1,700 hours of dialysis and underwent 66 surgeries.
Cody lived together with his parents in Tennessee.
He enjoyed watching football, and when he was well enough, he worked on a farm with his father.
On his 24th birthday, August 2, 2016, Cody suffered a heart attack and passed away.
Cody's parents wanted to bury Cody beside relatives in a nearby cemetery, but the family, living on an income of only $900 a month, did not have enough money to purchase a plot, afford a burial, or even spend about $700 to have Cody cremated.
So, they donated Cody's body to a company called Restore Life, which offered free cremation to the deceased in exchange for tissue for medical research.
At the time of the arrangement, it seems like a blessing, based on consent paperwork provided to the Saunders by Restore Life.
The Saunders family believed this meant that Restore Life would remove small skin samples from Cody, cremate the rest of his body, and then return his ashes.
Another reporting from the Reuters series indicates that many bereaved families and individuals making their own end-of-life choices who read consent paperwork for body notations are led to believe that only skin samples are going to be taken from the bodies due to the use of the word tissue, which actually functions as a sort of euphemism for organs, limbs, torsos, basically the entire body.
The Restore Life consent form Vassander signed for Cody didn't disclose that a donated body may be dismembered.
From the article by Brian Groh and John Shipman.
The month after Cody died, Restore Life sold part of the young man's body, his cervical spine.
The transaction required just a few email exchanges and $300 plus shipping.
Whether Restore Life vetted the buyer is unclear, but if workers there had verified their customer's identity, they would have learned he was a reporter from Reuters.
The news agency was seeking to determine how easy it might be to buy human body parts and whether those parts would be useful for medical research.
In addition to the spied, Reuters later purchased two human heads from Restore Life, each priced at $300.
The transactions demonstrate the startling ease with which human body parts may be bought and sold in the United States.
Neither the sales nor the shipments violated any laws, say lawyers, professors, and government officials who follow the issue closely.
Although it's illegal to sell organs used for transplants, it's perfectly legal in most states to sell body parts that were donated for research or education.
Buying wine over the internet is arguably more tightly controlled, generally requiring at minimum proof of age.
The hardship the family faced is not uncommon among donors, said Martha Thaler, chair of the Mortuary Science Program at Arapahoe Community College in Colorado.
Brie families are quote, vulnerable and are being put in the position of choosing this as an option when they don't have money, Thaler said.
Quote, the only thing that's more sad than a person who can't afford to live is a person who can't afford to die.
Damn, that's a profound quote and I think a chilling indictment of our current reality.
Yeah.
The Saunders say that they would not have donated Cody's remains if they would have known he would be dissected.
They felt he had already been through too many surgeries during his short life.
And yet, his father added, I couldn't afford to do nothing else, so I felt like that was the best option that we had.
Another deeply upsetting story is that of Doris Stouffer, a 74-year-old Arizona woman who passed away in 2013 after a battle with Alzheimer's.
Her family made the decision to donate her brain to science, hoping the gift might aid the search for a cure to the disease that had taken their grandmother from them.
From John Shiffman at Reuters.
At a nurse's suggestion, the family contacted Biological Resource Center, a local company that brokered the donation of human bodies for research.
Within the hour, BRC dispatched a driver to collect Doris.
Jim Stouffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother's body.
He also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic safety, and other non-medical experiments.
Ten days later, Jim received his mother's cremated remains.
He wasn't told how her body had been used.
Records reviewed by Reuters show that BRC workers detached one of Doris Stouffer's hands for cremation.
After sending those ashes back to her son, the company sold and shipped the rest of Stouffer's body to a taxpayer-funded research project for the U.S.
Army.
Her brain was never used for Alzheimer's research.
Instead, Stouffer's body became part of an Army experiment to measure damage caused by roadside bombs.
Internal BRC and military records show that at least 20 other bodies were also used in the blast experiments without permission of the donors or their relatives, a violation of U.S.
Army policy.
BRC sold donated bodies like Stouffer's for $5,893 each.
Army officials involved in the project said they never received the consent forms that donors or their families had signed.
Rather, the officials said they relied on assurances from BRC that families had agreed to let the bodies be used in such experiments.
The Army's human body experiments were part of a program to protect U.S.
soldiers from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
Donated bodies are not obliterated in explosions, a director at the Army Project interviewed by Reuters said, but the blasts do break bones and snap spines.
In an experiment witnessed by a Reuters reporter this year, two bodies wired to 100 biosensors flailed violently during an explosion and came to rest slumped, but intact.
This is so fucked up.
Yeah, it's...
Can you imagine being the guys who are behind the window that are like, you know, doing the, you've got like a dead body strapped to a chair that's ten feet away from a bomb?
Jesus Christ.
Yeah man, wanna order Jimmy John's for lunch?
Like... Yes, still, yeah.
For Jimmy John's, yeah.
There's not one near me, so if that's the price I gotta pay, then perhaps yes.
Working in the explosive body farm?
God.
Army policy requires that body donors or next of kin consent to the blast experiments, but records reviewed by Reuters show that the bodies or body parts of 34 people were shipped to the military without donor permission.
In 18 of the 34 cases, the donor consent forms neither mentioned nor offered any warning language about potential military experiments.
In the remaining 16 instances, the consent form presented an option to allow military and other violent experiments.
12 of the 16 families explicitly rejected violent experiments.
4 made no choice.
All 16 were shipped to the army anyway.
Literally no one said yes to this.
Literally no one that ended up in this experiment said yes to this.
And 12 said, I would really prefer if my loved ones' remains weren't exploded in military experiments.
And they did anyway.
Yeah.
Yikes.
But someone made approximately $6,000 off this.
So who's to say if it's good or bad or not?
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's like, they did check the form, but, you know, there was a used Honda money made per body.
There was one used Honda per corpse made.
So, you know, this is a pretty good deal.
Hey, Colonel Phillips, come over here and check this form.
It's a little bit smudged right on the area where it says, do not use for military explosions.
Does that look like a check to me, or does that look like a mistake?
I think it kind of looks like a mistake to me.
Unimaginably bleak.
So currently no federal regulation of this body brokerage industry exists.
And at the more local level, regulation and enforcement varies from state to state.
But that might change.
Fortunately, coverage of this issue by reporters from Reuters and other outlets and advocacy of families and groups like the National Funeral Directors Association has led Congress to take notice.
The Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act, introduced by Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida, and Texas Democrat Lizzie Fletcher, provide the Secretary of Health and Human Services with oversight of entities that deal with human bodies and non-transplantable body parts donated for education, research, and the advancement of medical, dental, and mortuary science.
Similar bipartisan efforts in the Senate are being led by Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tom Tillis of North Carolina.
Among other provisions in these bills, they will require inspections of facilities involved in the body trade, require informed consent when a donation is made, and create a clear chain of custody for each human body or body part.
If these bills are passed, they will ensure that shipments of human bodies and body parts are properly labeled and packaged, and ensure the respectful and proper disposition of donated bodies and parts.
And importantly, the Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act would establish penalties for those who violate these laws.
The legislation has yet to be passed, and hopefully one day it will be.
So, thank you for sticking with me on this journey where I explained how modern medical science was in large part built and continues to grow upon a foundation of the appropriated skeletons of the lower classes.
Do either of you have any closing thoughts on this?
Well, you know, I again return to the bafflement of the richness of material that you could be outraged by.
The amount of real horror and exploitation that goes on in using people's organs and bodies and body parts.
But instead, of course, conspiracists, they reject, you know, well-reported information like that from Reuters.
Instead, they like talking about these fantasies and seeing secret codes.
It's just, it's very, very frustrating because, you know, it's just a lot of outrage and energy that's being misdirected.
Yeah, as is usually the case.
I mean, imagine the kind of mental gymnastics that a, uh, a pilled person would have to do to come to terms with the fact that the US military is actually the one trafficking body parts, uh, to figure out how to better protect their soldiers, uh, during, uh, an IED attack.
It's pretty insane, I gotta say.
And I will close with this, a little bit of a personal story.
I myself have seen and interacted with a cadaver when I was about 14 years old.
I enrolled in an AP Biology summer school program.
And one of the field trips, we took to a morgue.
And I remember it pretty well.
The thing that I remember the most is that we got into the sort of examining room, and you know, some kids were, you know, excused, excused from it.
There were a couple kids who basically got in, they smelled the formaldehyde, they were like, I'm out.
I'm out.
Yeah, I'm out, which was the smart thing to do.
And the rest of us kind of stood and there was a body that was on a slab and it was covered, right?
There was a sheet over its body and its head.
And at one point, the medical student or the doctor, I can't remember which, walked over and he was beginning to sort of do his lesson about, you know, human anatomy and that sort of stuff.
And we got to hold the heart.
We got to hold the lungs, all of this stuff.
But the thing I remember the most is at one point he walked over to the body and he said, Oh, we're actually not going to need this.
And he reached down and grabbed the head, which was covered by, you know, a towel and lifted it up off the table and put it in a different, you know, different place.
up until this point we had no idea, I had no idea that the body I was looking at
already had a detached head. It looked like it was all together. So he picked this
thing up and he was like, "Oh we're not gonna be looking at this today." And he
lifted the head up and like put it somewhere else. And I decided at that
point that perhaps AP biology wasn't for me.
I devoted my life to the arts and entertainment.
I pursued an acting degree, and that was the last time that young Jake Rokitansky fortunately interacted with a human cadaver.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get access to a whole host of premium episodes, as well as ongoing miniseries like Perverts and a season two of Trickle Down that are happening.
Right now.
And also, you know, season one of Trickle Down, you'll get access to Spectral Voyager, my series with Brad.
So there's a whole lot of content there.
So if you've run through all of the main episodes and you are bored and you like hearing us discuss weird kind of stuff like this, I encourage you to go to patreon.com and sign up.
Ali, where can people find more of your work?
I post on, um, I guess X sometimes at, um, Peniel DeCalcify.
Most of my account is just dedicated to complaining about the train service in Chicago, so if you want to check that out, you can find me there.
Absolutely.
If you're somebody who's upset at the standard of service of the trains running in Chicago, which are, you know, are said to have notoriously decent public transportation, but you know the real truth, go follow at Peniel Decalcify on X, platform formerly known as Twitter.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It`s not a conspiracy, it`s a fact.
And now, today`s "AutoCue."
This morning, the daughters of a New Hampshire sheriff`s deputy who passed away in 2019 say
they`re horrified to learn their father`s body was part of a grotesque criminal scheme
at Harvard University.
FBI agents yesterday arrested this man, Cedric Lodge, for allegedly stealing and selling
dissected human body parts while he was manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School.
Investigators say in a scheme dating back to 2018, Lodge stole heads, brains, skin and
bones from cadavers donated to the school for educational purposes.
He then allegedly brought those parts to his home and, with his wife's help, sold them for tens of thousands of dollars.
Who could do something like that, you know?
What kind of person?
No respect at all for the family.
They need to pay.
Do you have anything to say to the family?
No.
Buyers identified in the indictment include Katrina McLean, owner of Cat's Creepy Creations, a Massachusetts store that advertises creations that shock the mind and shake the soul.
Officials say she and others were allowed to enter the morgue and choose what they wanted to buy, some items selling for hundreds of dollars each.
In one case, skin that was sold was allegedly made into leather.
And a PayPal account from one client allegedly included a transaction labeled head number seven.
The deans at Harvard Medical School calling the allegations an abhorrent betrayal.
But for the families involved, their trust has been lost.
The family of that New Hampshire sheriff's deputy say his wife died earlier this year.
