Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas
Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas
The University of North Texas Health Science Center built a flourishing business using hundreds of unclaimed corpses. It suspended the program after NBC News exposed failures to treat the dead and their families with respect.
Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors.
Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.
A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.
In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
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Isn't this the sort of thing that can happen when you check the box saying you're willing to be an organ donor?
No iirc donating your body to science and organ donation are completely different.
And it doesn't sound like he donated his body to science, if he did there would almost definitely be a paper trail because it is a hell of a hassle.
It's probably more like a clause in their military contracts
No.
Militaries aren't in the habit of selling the dead. They are in the business of making the dead. This is more the wheel house of greedy doctors.
Yes. And the "survivors" don't have a say in that if the person itself said otherwise before dying.
Training future doctors is a good cause and will most likely save lives in a similar fashion to donating a heart after all.
Edit: I removed a wrong part here claiming that the article is clickbait. I was off by a mile, see the reply to this post as to why.
In no way is this clickbait. It's a truly ugly thing that was done to these people.
None of these people volunteered their bodies to science.
The college made a deal with 2 Texas counties to take homeless peoples bodies, "try" to find their relatives, and if they couldnt, then sell their bodies to companies, hospitals and the US army. The college made $2 million+ selling these peoples bodies without consent, to the point where they were expanding their cadavers storage facilities.
Can you see the issue with an organization that is responsible for finding the loved ones of these dead people, but is paid millions of dollars if they don't? Turns out, after filing a foia request, the reporters were able to find dozens of these homeless people families, sometimes within minutes of trying. Many times there were active missing persons reports, or in one case the next of kin lived in the same city and had the same name as his deceased father. In one case, the family found out about their deceased father after he was already sold. To get him back, they were made to sign a waver allowing the donations. They sold the body again, and did not return it for 1.5 years. When they did, his ashes came in a box with a generic thank you letter and a bill of $56 for shipping.
On publishing their results, the multimillion dollar corpse factory shut itself down and fired its directors. The two Texas counties working with them are opening investigations. When the reporters contacted the companies and the army about the bodies, they all confirmed that they thought the bodies came from intentional and purposeful donations. None of them knew the actual source.
Hm I was clearly wrong, I apologize! The excuse is that I was really tired and already quite "clickbait state of mind" ish.
Thank you for taking the time to write this! ♥