How do I go about leaving my body to Medical Science?

[Gaborosus]

I have a rare auto immune diseas (Microscopic Polyangitis), caused small intestine to have two lots of surgery, arthritis, premature osteoporosis, heart murmur, kidney failure and consequent kidney transplant......I would like to leave my shell to medical science - what do I have to do to achieve this? Just tell my Doctor, or is there something else I have to do? I am certin it will be very useful - medical teams get very excited qand interested when they have to take care of me!! Any ideas

[ajb]

I am sure it will depend on where you live. I suggest you talk to your Doctor or directly to the university you would like to donate your body to. In the UK, and it may be different elsewhere stating you want to give you body to a university department in a will is not enough. They are under no obligation to take you. As such everything should be arranged before you die.

 

I too am think along these lines. I would like to leave my body to a local medical school (Cardiff I guess if they will take me). I must find out exactly how to do this.

[StringJunky]

Advice from the Royal College of Surgeons (UK) on this:

 

http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/patient_information/donations.html

Edited January 27, 2011 by StringJunky

[SMF]

In the US, call the anatomy department of your most local, or preferred, medical school and they will have someone whose job is to answer question, and who will send you an information pack regarding body donation. It does have to be set up ahead of time to minimize the period between your death and chemical preservation of your tissue in order to minimize degradation, and some departments prefer preservatives that are different from that used by the typical embalmer. You should be aware that very few donations are accepted for the study of specific medical conditions and depending upon the condition your donation may be denied. Most cadavers are used for training medical students in a gross anatomy course and there is concern about infection that students might contract, and the desire to have a complete normal body for study. Anatomical boards in different states have different rules regarding donation, and some take all donations whether they are usable or not. At most medical schools there can be research projects that require tissue from the gross lab and you can ask the body donation representative about this.

 

Donating ones body is a wonderful gift and all medical schools specifically train medical students to respect this donation and take their anatomical study seriously. SM

 

 

[Marat]

I tried to donate my father's cadaver for medical research or anatomical instruction and found that all the institutions I approached were positively perverse in all the bureaucratic hurdles they put in the way of a donation which would have been to their benefit. To make the donation, I would not only have to have filled out a ten-page 'application' form, but some institutions even insisted that the person whose body was to be donated write an essay describing why he wanted to do this! I was finally so disgusted with this instance of medical ethics gone insane that I just abandoned the plan.

 

If you donate a cadaver for anatomical instruction rather than research, however, you should keep in mind that medical students are almost universally mentally ill and delight in manifesting every form of disrespect you can imagine, as well as a few you probably cannot, toward the cadaver they are dissecting. I went into the washroom after a dissection once and found that the male genitalia of a cadaver had been cut off and put in the urinal.

[SMF]

Marat, your view regarding body donation and gross anatomy courses is very distorted and unfair. I am not a gross anatomist, but I have around 30 years of experience with these programs and first year medical students (in the US), and I have found that 99% of medical students would be very angry at the example you provided. There are always a few unethical clowns that get into medical schools from time to time and they are almost always flushed out because indignant students report their activities. In fact, it is these incidents that serve as necessary important teaching moments for faculty mentoring.

 

Your description of the application process is not as severe in many states but it is not medical ethics gone awry, it is due to our contentious and litigious society. A typical problem is due to some members of the family of the deceased who disagreed with, or were not informed of, the plans of the relative who wished to donate their body to society or a medical school that helped them with their own or a loved one's illness. Without extensive documentation of the donor's intentions, his or her angry relatives and a lawyer can overturn the donor's decision regarding his or her own body. SM

Edited January 28, 2011 by SMF

[Marat]

I was trying to donate the cadaver in Massachusetts, and it finally just seemed too ridiculous to me to have to write an essay that my dead father would have written and get some people falsely to notarize the essay as having been written before his death. I finally considered donating the cadaver to the body farm where the process of decay is forensically examined in a corpse exposed to the open air, but the distance (I think it was in Kentucky or Tennessee) turned out to be too great.

 

My experience with medical students in anatomy class all occurred in Germany, so that might account for the difference between my experience and yours respecting their treatment of dissection cadavers.

[StringJunky]

We need to be mindful when writing stuff about attitudes and procedures of this nature that they are not necessarily uniformly prevalent across all jurisdictions and that SFN is an international community...it may not be applicable in a particular reader's country.

 

I noticed the Human Tissue Authority link within the RCS link I provided doesn't work: this should take you there...this will give more explicit details:

 

http://www.hta.gov.uk/donations.cfm

Edited January 28, 2011 by StringJunky