Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains

By Annie Cheney

Book Overview

"You are a little soul carrying around a corpse." -Epictetus "Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will follow." - Matthew 24-28 Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative expose of the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts. Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these "body brokers" capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever- commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course of three years, when there's that much money to be made with no federal regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are willing to employ questionable practices-from deception and outright theft-to acquire, market and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons. In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where fresh torsos are delivered in Igloo coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room normally used for banquets. "That torso that you're living in right now is just flesh and bones to me. To me, it's a product," says the New Jersey-based broker presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the "resurrectionists" of the nineteenth century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home, crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities. Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way of death, Body Brokers is both a captivating work of first-person reportage and a surprising inside look at a little-known aspect of the "death care" world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0767917340
• ISBN13: 9780767917346
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Required reading for surgeons, medical students and nurses.

Everyone involved in surgery or medical education should read this book. Not only is it so well written it is difficult to put down, it raises many issues we should all think about. The donation of a body is a difficult and wonderful thing that we should all consider to benefit both the living and those training to become physicians. This book reads like novel, and made me wish that it was. Ms Cheney reveals the seediest underside of what can go wrong when the final common denominator is money and not patients. As an orthopaedic surgeon who has been to courses using cadavers to learn new techniques and was directly effected by the Mastromarino scandal and recall described in this book, I was completely engrossed and disturbed. I highly recommend this to everyone, especially if they are involved or interested in donation or medicine.

I hope every member of Congress reads this book

With fortitude that few could muster, Cheney unshrouds the secret trade in cadaver parts. A compelling read I couldn't put down. Yes, the dead can help the living, but Cheney's expose' reveals the lack of regulation--to make it safe and to limit profiteering in a black market. Those of us in the funeral consumer movement have been aware of this for some time but have been unable to move legislators to do anything. We're hoping Annie's book will make the difference. Lisa Carlson Author, "Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love" Executive Director, Funeral Ethics Organization P.S. I'd bet the one-star reviews are from people in the body parts business!

The Underground Industry in Body Parts

In graphic detail, Cheney explains the lucrative world of trade in bodies and body parts. What are corpses used for? - surgical training, anatomical studies in med schools and seminars (which I have participated in), human tissue grafts (bone, cartilage, heart valves, corneas) placed intra-operatively, forensic studies, accident re-enactments - legitimate uses that make us all better off. The jist of Cheney's book is the procurement process - shot full with questionable methods and unsavory characters. The sale of bodies is illegal in the United States but "expenses" incurred in handling the body can be re-imbursed. When handled creatively, a corpse can run up quite an expense - say, $10,000 or even much more. Some individuals or families donate their own or a loved one's body to a medical school, which then may - legally - pass (expense) this body on to a body broker. A funeral director may offer poor families free cremation as an incentive in return for consent to use the body for research. Of course, once the body goes to the body broker, the parts may eventually be disposed of by cremation, but the funeral director will have no way of tracking this information for the family. The body parts are piecemealed out to the highest bidders - usually legitimate users who have no idea or interest in where the parts came from. Neglecting to offer specific consent leaves the family in the dark as to how the body of their loved one was put to use. Cheney masterfully exposes the unscroupulous practices surrounding this thriving underground industry, but she doesn't dwell on the benefits to society. To get this information, you might consider reading "Stiff," by Mary Roach. Auto-crash bodies have helped fine-tune seat belts and airbags. Crash dummies are fine, but there's nothing like a body. Some are allowed to rot under varied environmental conditions - rain, sun, hot or cold, with or without clothing, etc., for forensic research. I already mentioned uses by the education and health industries above, and in most cases, the body is used as needed, without regard for niceties. Some are dropped from airplanes to see what height of drop is required to rip off clothing. How does this treatment differ from a body being cremated when the body, already abandoned by life (or the soul, if you please) has only symbolic value left for the family? That obviously depends on the family. Cheney doesn't review potential solutions, but it seems to me this deserves ethical study. A good end result might be legalizing the sale of bodies under carefully developed ethical regulations. Informed consent with a specified range of body uses acceptable to the family might be spelled out. Prices always come down when an industry is legitimized, which would be a side benefit. Cheney spent three years researching for her captivating book. Perhaps her efforts will pave the road toward adequate regulation and supervision of this necessary industry...I hope

Upton Sinclair & Jessica Mitford move over

Good thing it is not a long book because I could not put it down! A superb read and a revelationary look behind the scenes into the smelly and shadowy realm of the bold new world of the for-profit tissue and body brokering industry. In the same vane as Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle about the Chicago slaughter-houses and meat packing industry of the early 1900s and Jessica Mitford's expose The American Way of Death that shined much needed light upon the practices of the funeral industry in the last half of the 20th Century, Annie Cheney's book, Body Brokers, unearths the hidden side of an industry that is generating multi-million dollar profits for the modern day disarticulators and the corporations they supply. Cheney also does a wonderful job of showing how these contemporary Burke and Hares have resurrected centuries old strategies for making money off of the dead. Her personal encounters in prisons, crematoria, morgues and hotel ballrooms with many of the principle characters in this ghoulish business add living flesh and flowing blood - sometimes humour - to the inhumane side of this flourishing industry. Reading this book was an eye-opening experience, and it is clear that today's body brokers will NOT want you doing the same. Knowledge is the best defense against both fear and deception. The book provides multiple first hand accounts of personal and family tragedies at the hands of these profiteers that you and your loved wil want to avoid. Thanks Annie for having the courage to investigate and tell this story. CBLJ

This will be a best seller

Gripping story, hard to put down. I thought the book was well researched. The author brings the characters in the story alive and makes effective arguments about the secret world of the cadaver trade where much money is to be made and how the market dynamics have allowed this to happen. This subject received recent media attention and I would imagine it will attract many people's interest.