Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

There are many positives to donating your body to science. In the modern death landscape, body donation is the only surefire way to make sure your death is free. After your death, Science Support will pick up your corpse, transport you to their facility, use you to cure cancer (note: results may vary), and then pay for your cremation at Westwind.

Indeed, your body might be used on the front lines of medical research. My own grandfather died after a long, debilitating bout with Alzheimer’s, including one memorable Christmas Eve where he managed to steal the car keys in the middle of the night and disappear for seven hours into downtown Honolulu. Ho-ho-horrible Christmas morning to you too, family. If the donated heads of Alzheimer’s patients, with brains containing the plaques and tangles that turned my grandfather into a stranger, could make a difference to other families, off with their heads, I say.

Unfortunately, not every dead body goes to what might be considered “noble ends.” There is a slim possibility that your donated head will be the head, the head that holds the key to the mysteries of the twenty-first century’s great disease epidemics. But it is equally possible your body will end up being used to train a new crop of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in the art of the facelift. Or dumped out of a plane to test parachute technology. Your body is donated to science in a very . . . general way. Where your parts go is not up to you.

The use of corpses for the advancement of science has come a long way in the past four hundred years. In the sixteenth century, medicine was practiced with a feeble grasp of how the human body actually functioned. Medical texts misunderstood everything from how blood flowed through the body to the locations of vital organs to what caused sickness to develop in the first place (accepted answer: imbalances in the body’s four “humors”—phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile). Renaissance artist Andreas Vesalius, upset that medical students were learning human anatomy by dissecting dogs, secretly plucked corpses of criminals from the gallows. It wasn’t until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that surgical training schools consistently provided human anatomical dissections for teaching and research. The demand for corpses was so high that professors took to robbing fresh graves for bodies. Or, in the case of William Burke and William Hare in nineteenth-century Scotland, murdering living people (sixteen of them) and selling their bodies to be dissected by a public anatomical lecturer.

The two men from Science Support rolled a large box off the back of their truck. In the box were two human heads, surrounded by ice packs filled with small gelled beads that resembled Dippin’ Dots ice cream. As soon as I signed for the shipment, the gentlemen slammed shut the back of their truck and screeched out of the parking lot. This exchange was typical. The Science Support fellows regularly brought deliveries of torsos, heads, and other assorted viscera. We also got a single leg once, but that wasn’t from Science Support.

“Hey, Caitlin, you see that leg in the reefer?” Mike asked. After six months as his colleague I could discern the subtle distinction between all-business Mike, genuinely asking if I had seen the aforementioned leg, and wry, sarcastic Mike, about to crack the most minuscule of smiles.

“Well, no Mike, I haven’t seen this leg you speak of. Is it a Science Support leg?”

“No, man, the lady’s alive,” he said. “She had it amputated yesterday. Diabetes, I guess. She called to see if we could cremate just her leg. That was the weirdest phone call. Chris picked it up at the hospital this morning.”

“She’s cremating just her leg? So you’re telling me this is a . . . premation?” I replied. My joke was rewarded with a hint of a laugh.

“Pre-cremation—premation—that’s good. Like the guy we got from San Jose last week. The one who set himself on fire with his cigarette. Premation.” He shook his head and turned back to the computer.

Score one for appropriately timed morbid humor. I had spent months trying to impress Mike with my death-positive gumption, but he was only now beginning to trust me with a joke.

The heads in this Science Support box belonged, respectively, to a gentleman of eighty and a lady of seventy-eight. Each head came with long identification sheets. The sheets didn’t give us their names or where they were from, but did provide a whole list of superfluous fun facts like “Head No. 1 is allergic to shellfish, tomatoes, morphine, and strawberries,” and “Head No. 2 has brain cancer and is prone to hay fever.”