The human body has been a commodity for centuries. In the
crudest form of selling the body, prostitution has been around since the
ancient Greeks borrowed it from the Fertile Crescent (where it was somewhat
ironically called “sacred prostitution”). Even today, economies are
sustained as labor produces goods and services are traded. But it’s not only
living bodies that can be commodified. Dead bodies, despite the taboo attached
to them, were hot items in nineteenth century Scotland. The Enlightenment brought
with it a fervent passion for learning and discovery, and nineteenth century Scottish
anatomy schools had a particularly hands-on approach. How else were the
pioneers of surgical training, John and William Hunter, to train their
students? Even the Murder Act of 1752, which held that the bodies of murderers
were to be dissected and anatomized, simply could not meet the insatiable
demand for fresh dead bodies.
A lecture at the Hunterian anatomy school, Great Windmill Street, London; Wellcome Library |
A Mortsafe lock on a Scottish grave to prevent theft |
As I learned more about the lengths people took to ensure a
proper burial, I was struck by how dedicated people were to being forever
contained in a wooden box until your flesh gives way to decomposition. I
understand the religious aspiration of wanting to meet one’s Maker intact for
ultimate judgment, but surely any benevolent Maker can see the merits of using
one’s body to serve those still alive. Similarly, a benevolent God would surely
accept all honorable souls into heaven in their most beautiful form--- not
simply the one you’ve got at the Gates.
At some point, preserving your body in its pristine state when
you can no longer use it must become selfish. During the Scottish Enlightenment,
there was a huge demand for corpses so as to better learn surgical techniques
and understand the underlying physiology. Certainly, the training of surgeons
(and perhaps even modern day organ donation) is a noble enough to warrant the
donation of an otherwise useless body. And what happens to the soul? Does the
soul not remain intact even if the body mutilated? What exactly does it mean to
be made in the “image and likeness of God?”
I admit that the personal detachment I hold for the generic
dead body gets a little murkier when I think of loved ones’ corpses, but I
still think there is something to be said for self-sacrifice for posterity’s
sake. The Enlightenment failed to sufficiently delineate the mind from the
vessel that carries it. This notion is particularly noticeable in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: “Our ideas reach no further than our
experience.” No offense Hume, but surely my imagination and uniquely human
ability to empathize mean that my ideas do indeed expand beyond personal
experience.
David Hume, the father of modern Skepticism |
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