Asian Bioethics Review

457 The Melancholy of Anatomy Speaking for the Dead: The Human Body in Biology and Medicine, Second Edition By D. Gareth Jones and Maja I. Whitaker Farnham, England and Burlington VT, USA: Ashgate Publishing, 2009 296 pp + xi pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-7452-8 (i) Medical doctor in ethics seminar: I don’t care what happens to my body when I’m dead. When I’m dead I’m dead and that’s all there is to it. Question: Would you mind if they played football with your head? (ii) It was reported that three homeless men in Perm killed another man with a club, ate parts of him, and sold the leftovers to a kebab shop, which used them in sandwiches. (BBC World Service Radio, 14 November 2009) (iii) Von Hagens’ Bodyworlds is on show at the Singapore Science Centre. A television commercial claims it has already been viewed by over 30 million worldwide. (iv) A medical student makes off with a penis from the anatomy hall and entertains friends with it at a party. (v) A medical student in Taiwan talks respectfully with a terminally ill woman whose body she donated for him to dissect after her death as part of his medical training. He will later, with her family and his medical teachers, pay his last respects to her in a joint funeral service for all those whose bodies have been given for the education of his year-group. B O O K R E V I E W B o o k R e v i e w Asian Bioethics Review December 2009 Volume 1, Issue 4 457–460 A s i a n B i o e t h i c s R e v i e w D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 9 Vo l u m e 1 , I s s u e 4 458 (vi) A mother donates one of her kidneys to her sick daughter, who recovers her health. (vi) That’s not your son, it’s a cadaver. (Consultant to the parent of what the consultant sees as a brain-dead bed-blocker in ITU) (vii) I believe that when I die I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive. (Bertrand Russell, “What I believe”, 1925, reprinted in Why I Am Not a Christian, 1957) (viii) So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. (I Corinthians, 15:42, Holy Bible, AV 1611) These events and claims are to do with human bodies or body parts, alive or dead; or heavenly bodies. They can be seen as, variously, showing respect to or even love for the persons whose bodies or body parts they are, were or will be; or as demonstrating indifference; or even contempt. Does it make sense to ask whether there is or could be a common, reasonable basis for the respect, the indifference or the lack of respect? What are the ethical forces and sources at play? We are not short of a rich and jarring mix of motives and interpretations. The no-nonsense doctor in the seminar was given pause by the football prospect. The Permians, if sincere utilitarians, might plead hunger in mitigation. Gunther von Hagens’ professed educational zeal is at odds with a view of his exhibition of plastinated human bodies as a mawkish peepshow. Is the party-going student desecrating one of the mortal remains of a fellow human being or simply coming up with a healthy antidote to the stresses of dissection? Or both? Should he be expelled from medical school forthwith if the Dean hears of the escapade? We may, and I think we should, admire the Taiwanese arrangements, rather than the use of unclaimed bodies for dissection. The kidney-donating mother may be motivated by nothing but profound love for her daughter. The consultant is doing his duty: he has good reasons for his plain speaking, though the parent is stunned. In at least one obvious sense, Russell’s “I” survives his bodily death despite his having forbidden it to do so. The evidence: I can still see him and hear his...