Cadavers

Last month the motor truck in which 739-lb. "Happy Jack" Eckert lived, traveled and displayed himself as a freak of nature collided with a freight truck at Flomaton, Ala. Ten men succeeded in carrying Happy Jack into a hospital and placing him on two beds lashed together.

There a fortnight ago Jack died of fractured ribs and internal injuries.

Promptly the dead monster's manager offered the body to famed Tulane University in New Orleans, "because Jack always wished some school be given the opportunity to study his glandular system."* The surviving next of kin, Sister Katharine Eckert, 74, of Fort Wayne, Ind., agreed. But Tulane refused the offer because fat cadavers are useless for the study of anatomy. Hinted, also, were Tulane's fears that Jack's sister might change her mind at the last moment or that there might be legal complications about getting a body across the Alabama-Louisiana State line for anatomical study.

So last week the fat freak's body was placed in a 500-lb. cypress coffin, hauled to Mobile and buried by lodge brothers-- Elks and Woodmen of the World.

Tulane's diffidence toward the offer of Jack's corpse was not without significance, for the whole subject of cadavers used by students of anatomy is one which medical school authorities understandably dislike airing in public. Yet since the 1880s the business has been aboveboard and regulated by statutes. Before then all U. S. medical schools relied mainly on body snatchers for their corpses. Bodies sold for dissection usually came from undertaking parlors and graveyards. As late as 1893 when Johns Hopkins Medical School was opened, the 1,200 students in Baltimore's medical schools had to rely on this informal source of supply. However, most States passed "anatomical acts" in the 1880s. These solved the situation by granting full protection to corpses destined for burial, while legitimizing the dissection of public charges.

Pennsylvania's procedure with cadavers, most comprehensive and expert in the land, is authorized by a statute similar to those existing in other States. The bodies of all indigents dying in hospitals, prisons, poorhouses, and public institutions of all kinds, with the exception of the bodies of victims of violence which must be autopsied by the coroner, are delivered to a State anatomical board, of which Dr. Addinell Hewson, Professor of Anatomy in Temple University Dental School, is secretary. Further exceptions are made in the cases of bodies of U. S. soldiers, sailors and marines, Pennsylvania militiamen, and travelers; and persons dying of "smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, meningitis, bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, cholera, leprosy, anthrax, glanders, erysipelas. Alcoholics, overweight bodies, mutilated or decomposed bodies must be buried by public authority because unfit."

"Fit" bodies are shipped to the depot which Dr. Hewson manages in Philadelphia. There the bodies are injected with three gallons of fluid, greased, wrapped in paper and cloth, and refrigerated at 5DEG F. Dr. Hewson is proud that he preserves his cadavers so well that he can turn them over to relatives who occasionally appear two-and-a-half years after the subject's death. Such relatives always get the bodies they want, for the supply of cadavers now is so ample that no medical school or anatomical board will risk a quarrel for possession.

Pennsylvania's medical students use 1,000 bodies a year. Up to eight students may work on one corpse, sharing the laboratory costs. These vary from $17 to $22 a body, depending upon the expenses to which Dr. Hewson's board was put to collect, preserve and distribute the stock. After dissection, remnants are packed in plain boxes, prayed over, buried in a cemetery.

New York City medical schools have for the instruction of their 495 medical freshmen, the pick of the 30,000 unknown who die annually in the metropolis. The surplus dead are placed in plain coffins and hauled by barge to one of the East River islands for burial.

Boston is the centre of Massachusetts' body business. Unclaimed dead paupers and prisoners may be carved, then buried by medical schools. In the '80s, Boston rocked with a scandal about medical "resurrection men" who were supposedly tanning human hides for gloves & slippers.

In San Francisco, an anonymous doctor makes the rounds of poorhouses, reformatories, public hospitals, asylums and jails. Each year he selects 30 to 40 specimens for 472 medical students of Stanford and the University of California. Cost of transportation, preservation and storage averages $10 a cadaver. San Francisco's anonymous cadaver collector gets a dozen offers a year from people who want to donate their bodies, many more from those who want to sell. He accepts none.

Chicago medical schools, which get their anatomical specimens from public institutions, burn their remains. That practice seems to be delicately tied up with a legendary incident which occurred before Illinois passed its law legitimizing the supply of cadavers to schools, and which many a Chicago doctor likes to relate. Two students of what is now Northwestern University snatched a body from a Wisconsin cemetery, dressed it, propped it between them on the seat of their buggy. On the way back to Chicago they stopped at a tavern for drinks. While they were inside two Rush (University of Chicago) medical students drove up on their way to snatch another Wisconsin corpse. Quick-witted, they transferred the Northwestern cadaver to their buggy. One drove away to Chicago, the other got into the Northwestern buggy, pretended he was the corpse. In due course the drinkers left the tavern, continued their journey toward Chicago. Soon one remarked that the corpse seemed to be getting warmer. Thereupon the Rush student gave the Northwesterners the scare of their lives by muttering: "You'd be getting warmer too, if you had been baking in hell as long as I have."

*Apparently his pituitary gland had misfunctioned.

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