Legacy Matters
"Body Brokers : Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains" (Annie Cheney)
From the review in Wired, Their Kingdom for a Corpse
Want to buy a head? On the American body-part market, the going price is between $500 and $900, plus another $50 if you'd like the brain, too. A torso will set you back as much as $3,000, while a single foot could cost $650.
At these prices, there's plenty of temptation for people to take advantage of the dead. But as a disturbing new book reveals, the burgeoning trade in human remains is largely unmonitored. Universities, mortuaries and medical companies routinely buy and sell arms, legs and elbows with virtually no oversight.
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In her book, Cheney travels from coast to coast, tracking the fates of the tens of thousands of dead bodies that end up in the "cadaver trade" each year. The corpses -- including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues -- "are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers," Cheney writes.
In Miami, she watches urological surgeons learn how to remove kidneys by poking into torsos in the Ocean Room of the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. In Gainesville, Florida, she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools. And throughout, she finds plenty of people in the body-part business who really wish she'd go away.