Less dead bodies left to medical schools for dissection these days, according to The Guardian. It's partly attributed to the changing attitudes about what happens with our bodies after death, since the unauthorised retention of deceased children's organs at Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool. The often controversial press coverage which followed Bodyworlds, Gunther von Hagens' travelling collection of preserved dissected corpses, is not cited as an influence on why less people are donating their bodies to medical schools.
Quite the opposite, it seems...if you haven't quite made celebrity status during your lifetime, why not go for immortality the plastinated way? Travel the world and attract awed attention wherever you go... you just have to be dead and dissected first, and no-one will actually know it's you, but it still gets you more than the proverbial 15 minutes of fame - a lot more than being a humble medical school cadaver.
Alternatively, why wait until you're dead to give your internal organs a media airing? Reality TV shows like the BBC's 'City Hospital', filmed at London's St Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals, might broadcast your operation, if you've got a particularly spectacular illness or something which affects a lot of people. Educational. Not recommended viewing if you like a late breakfast though...
Do surgeons ever stop to think how weird it might be for patients, to have a chat with someone who was grappling (in a very skilled medical sense, of course) with their innards, hours earlier? Unpleasantly intimate. Conjures up visions of being the unfortunate dissected person in Hogarth's engraving 'The Reward of Cruelty' (1750-51), with the obvious difference of not being dead or dissected, but having undergone major surgery instead. Maybe it's the drugs they give you... Or maybe it's the downside of studying death...odd snippets of information and images sometimes pop into your mind, at times you'd really prefer them not to...
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