Working with cadavers in an anatomy lab is often a humbling and monumental moment in a doctor’s career. Students spend hours toiling over dead bodies with gratitude and reverence for the donation that allows them to practice and learn about human anatomy in their journey to become healers. Only, sometimes, these cadavers are not truly donated — and the dead person never consented to have their body dismembered.
When a dead person’s next of kin cannot be located or their family cannot afford a funeral, the responsibility of what to do with the remains falls to the state or county. In these cases, unclaimed bodies are sometimes sent to and accepted by medical schools, but several experts in the field object to the practice, raising ethical concerns that these people never consented to being dissected in life.
