Thousands of people donate their bodies to science each year, to be dissected by wide-eyed med students during their first-year anatomy class, or to be used in other areas of training and research. But that is a relatively new development.
Until the 1940s and 50s, med schools relied mostly on unclaimed bodies for this purpose. World War II helped bring about a major cultural shift in how we look at the body after death. People gave blood for blood banks, they donated corneas - and eventually, when surgeons started to transplant organs successfully, the idea of giving away parts of your body after death became more acceptable.
This development also created an urgent need for more legislation around the use of bodies and tissues.
Read Full Article »
