Customer Reviews

Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

In graphic detail, Cheney explains the lucrative world of trade in bodies and body parts. What are corpses used for? - surgical training, anatomical studies in med schools and seminars (which I have participated in), human tissue grafts (bone, cartilage, heart valves, corneas) placed intra-operatively, forensic studies, accident re-enactments - legitimate uses that make us all better off. The jist of Cheney's book is the procurement process - shot full with questionable methods and unsavory characters.

The sale of bodies is illegal in the United States but "expenses" incurred in handling the body can be re-imbursed. When handled creatively, a corpse can run up quite an expense - say, $10,000 or even much more.

Some individuals or families donate their own or a loved one's body to a medical school, which then may - legally - pass (expense) this body on to a body broker. A funeral director may offer poor families free cremation as an incentive in return for consent to use the body for research. Of course, once the body goes to the body broker, the parts may eventually be disposed of by cremation, but the funeral director will have no way of tracking this information for the family. The body parts are piecemealed out to the highest bidders - usually legitimate users who have no idea or interest in where the parts came from. Neglecting to offer specific consent leaves the family in the dark as to how the body of their loved one was put to use.

Cheney masterfully exposes the unscroupulous practices surrounding this thriving underground industry, but she doesn't dwell on the benefits to society. To get this information, you might consider reading "Stiff," by Mary Roach. Auto-crash bodies have helped fine-tune seat belts and airbags. Crash dummies are fine, but there's nothing like a body. Some are allowed to rot under varied environmental conditions - rain, sun, hot or cold, with or without clothing, etc., for forensic research. I already mentioned uses by the education and health industries above, and in most cases, the body is used as needed, without regard for niceties. Some are dropped from airplanes to see what height of drop is required to rip off clothing.

How does this treatment differ from a body being cremated when the body, already abandoned by life (or the soul, if you please) has only symbolic value left for the family? That obviously depends on the family.

Cheney doesn't review potential solutions, but it seems to me this deserves ethical study. A good end result might be legalizing the sale of bodies under carefully developed ethical regulations. Informed consent with a specified range of body uses acceptable to the family might be spelled out. Prices always come down when an industry is legitimized, which would be a side benefit.

Cheney spent three years researching for her captivating book. Perhaps her efforts will pave the road toward adequate regulation and supervision of this necessary industry...I hope so.

With fortitude that few could muster, Cheney unshrouds the secret trade in cadaver parts. A compelling read I couldn't put down. Yes, the dead can help the living, but Cheney's expose' reveals the lack of regulation--to make it safe and to limit profiteering in a black market.

Those of us in the funeral consumer movement have been aware of this for some time but have been unable to move legislators to do anything. We're hoping Annie's book will make the difference.

Lisa Carlson
Author, "Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love"
Executive Director, Funeral Ethics Organization

P.S. I'd bet the one-star reviews are from people in the body parts business!

Cheney's expose is long on critique and short on solutions. A disturbing (but somewhat over-long)disclosure of practices that seem sordid. Don't the dead deserve better treatment than what she depicts? What are the solutions? Don't expect themhere.

A human head might bring in seven or eight hundred dollars, a spine at least as much again. Shoulders, knees, bones, brains, various viscera--pretty much every part of a dead body can be sold off if the corpse is fresh enough. The demand for material is high: medical schools and medical device companies and surgical skills workshops need bodies or body parts for dissection, and willed body programs don't produce enough corpses to go around. That's why, shocking though it is, there is apparently a robust underground trade in human remains--in the U.S., in the present day.

Annie Cheney explores the gruesome subculture of modern-day body snatchers in her book Body Brokers, which grew out of an award-winning article she wrote on the subject for Harper's. She discusses in detail how bodies en route to their final resting places can be harvested for parts--by pathologists' assistants, for example, or corrupt funeral directors, or crematorium operators. She discusses also the various markets for body parts, including institutions that need bodies for instructional dissection as well as factories that transform human tissue into products--"injectable bone paste" and the sorts of things you might find in Home Depot, screws and dowels and wedges, except that they're made out of human bone. ("It's all precision tooled....") Cheney also provides a chapter on the "Resurrection Men" of the 19th century, men who, like their modern-day counterparts, did the dirty work of supplying corpses for a price. But the Resurrectionists usually had to dig up fresh graves to get their material.

One comes away from Cheney's book impressed at the apparent extent to which this gruesome business is going on, and impressed also with how many people seem to be able to sleep comfortably at night when they've got a refrigerator full of heads in the next room. It's interesting to note also how efficient the business is: when possible, bodies are dismembered and their parts sold off individually.

"The three of them went on in this way, methodically moving from body to body, part to part. Tyler removed Ronald King's elbows--one slice on the forearm and two swift strokes forward with his saw until the bones snapped in two. Then his hands and knees. One slice on his calf and his thigh, a few cuts of his saw, and the leg came right off. Then his head. Tyler plucked out King's brain like a smooth boiled egg from its shell."

This makes perfect financial sense, of course. Why supply a class full of gynecologists with perfect corpses, for example, when the students can just as well practice on limbless, headless torsos?

"Over the next couple of days, Brown hung around in the conference room, watching the gynecologists as they probed the vaginas of the dead women. When a torso needed adjusting, he noticed, the doctors called on Tyler to help. Tyler gingerly moved the chilly flesh into the right position, raising or lowering it so that the doctors could get a good view. When the dead ladies began to smell, Tyler spritzed them with deodorizer. At the end of the day, he packed them into Igloo coolers. The next morning he brought them out again."

As you can see, Cheney's book is deliciously gruesome in parts.

Body Brokers is readable and seems very well researched. The author documents her sources in the book's notes and bibliography. My only difficulty with it is that, although it's quite short--the narrative ends, a little too abruptly, after 193 pages--it is difficult to keep the names of the various characters and companies straight. (Cheney provides a list of characters at the beginning of the book, but it's still a bit confusing.) Otherwise, Body Brokers is an interesting and certainly an eye-opening read. It could make some people change their minds about leaving their bodies to science.

-- Debra Hamel

Everyone involved in surgery or medical education should read this book. Not only is it so well written it is difficult to put down, it raises many issues we should all think about.

The donation of a body is a difficult and wonderful thing that we should all consider to benefit both the living and those training to become physicians. This book reads like novel, and made me wish that it was. Ms Cheney reveals the seediest underside of what can go wrong when the final common denominator is money and not patients.

As an orthopaedic surgeon who has been to courses using cadavers to learn new techniques and was directly effected by the Mastromarino scandal and recall described in this book, I was completely engrossed and disturbed. I highly recommend this to everyone, especially if they are involved or interested in donation or medicine.

This book is nothing more than the extension of a magazine article and the author's process of going through the research in writing it. She provides little substance to allow outsiders to fully understand the myriad issues involved in the use of human remains and instead chooses to sensationalize poorly researched facts. By doing so she does a disservice to the thousands of hard working people who are trying to pass on the gift of life to help others - whether through cadaveric training or tissue donation. There are much better books out there for people who are truly interested in learning about this industry. See M. Goodwin's book for instance.

Gripping story, hard to put down. I thought the book was well researched. The author brings the characters in the story alive and makes effective arguments about the secret world of the cadaver trade where much money is to be made and how the market dynamics have allowed this to happen. This subject received recent media attention and I would imagine it will attract many people's interest.

"When you donate your body, you've given up the right to choose how it will be used" and "Leaving your loved ones with a funeral home may expose them to unscrupulous body parts dealers". That basically sums up the book.

The first 1/3 of the book is an interesting (and disturbing) foray into the US body parts trade and the legal and illegal aspects of it. Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't build upon the first part and is simply backstory for how the investigations were done. Interesting, but not particularly exciting.

This would be much more suited to an article, rather than a book.

Verdict: Borrow it from the library (Remember what that is?)

Good thing it is not a long book because I could not put it down! A superb read and a revelationary look behind the scenes into the smelly and shadowy realm of the bold new world of the for-profit tissue and body brokering industry.

In the same vane as Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle about the Chicago slaughter-houses and meat packing industry of the early 1900s and Jessica Mitford's expose The American Way of Death that shined much needed light upon the practices of the funeral industry in the last half of the 20th Century, Annie Cheney's book, Body Brokers, unearths the hidden side of an industry that is generating multi-million dollar profits for the modern day disarticulators and the corporations they supply. Cheney also does a wonderful job of showing how these contemporary Burke and Hares have resurrected centuries old strategies for making money off of the dead. Her personal encounters in prisons, crematoria, morgues and hotel ballrooms with many of the principle characters in this ghoulish business add living flesh and flowing blood - sometimes humour - to the inhumane side of this flourishing industry.

Reading this book was an eye-opening experience, and it is clear that today's body brokers will NOT want you doing the same. Knowledge is the best defense against both fear and deception. The book provides multiple first hand accounts of personal and family tragedies at the hands of these profiteers that you and your loved wil want to avoid. Thanks Annie for having the courage to investigate and tell this story. CBLJ

Awesome book. Compassionate, funny, sometimes scary, and in the end - world view changing; it's impossible to look at funeral homes the same way again. Cheney strides through widely divergent narrative landscapes in Body Brokers - from the sweeping historical perspective, to the investigative journalist turning up dirt and, most affectingly, the personal voice. In my opinion, each works and reinforces the whole. Based on some of the negative posts here I'd wager some folks prefer their journalism dry. I couldn't disagree more. The human touch makes the story crackle and hit you in the gut.

Cheney takes us to shiny steel rooms where the human body is cut apart like a side of beef - a vista with one foot in medical science and the other in slasher movies. Cheney is not afraid to bravely share with us what this does to her personally. She's also not afraid to bring to solid ground the wild characters who play this game for economic opportunity and those who would fight them. The story of abuse goes from the cadaver trade all the way, chillingly, into the transplant tissue industry. Everywhere she looks, Cheney finds indifference, lack of regulation, and the blind eye of the institutions we think are guarding the dignity and wishes of the dead and their families. No doubt this is a call to action. Send a copy to your congressperson.

This stuff is raw, weird, and yet totally logical - almost normal. I found myself totally sympathetic to the entrepreneurial motivations of a broker one minute then horrified by the implications the next. Ultimately I was left wanting more! My only significant criticism is that this book it is too short. I devoured it in a handful of sittings!