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This book was so disturbing as it was non fiction. I didn't finish it because I was feeling sick from reading it
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Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
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Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of a little known aspect of the “death care” 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 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 large 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, 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 19th 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 a captivating work of first-person reportage.
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 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 large 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, 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 19th 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 a captivating work of first-person reportage.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,2006
This edition
- Format
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240 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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March 7, 2006 by Broadway
- ISBN
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9780767917339
- ASIN
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0767917332
- Language
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English
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617.954 Cheney, 2006 -- QPB Catalog Winter 20€06
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An interesting read diving deep into the world of the trade of human remains.
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A dangerous read if you were planning on being cremated, autopsied, or donating your body to science.
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This work of non-fiction is a quick read, but intensely gruesome and horrifying. It will make you look at human death and what happens to bodies afterwards in a whole new light. I found myself having to take breaks for a few deep breaths. It would make one heck of a horror film, and all the more horrible because it's true.
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The selling of human remains is a very brisk, very lucrative business.
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This was in interesting read and one of the few books out there on this subject. It did give some intriguing glimpse into the world but it feels like it just grazes the surface of the subject. It doesn't have alot of detailed information and focuses on the sensationalized cases without going in depth about the trade itself beyond the flagrant abuses. The other thing that bothered me is for a non-fiction book it at times read like a fiction book. Detailed descriptions of people as if they are a character in a romance novel left me with a jarring sense of what I was actually reading.
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It’s hard to imagine subject matter more cringe-worthy than the for-profit tissue and body business. Perhaps this explains the relative obscurity of Annie Cheney’s Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade in Human Remains, a muckraking exposé on this for-profit, shockingly lucrative industry. Upon the book’s release, publications around the country gave it generally favorable reviews, and predicted that it should blow the lid off of this subject. But it never happened. Body Brokers is a slim book at 193 pages, expanded from a piece Cheney wrote for Harper’s, perhaps the first significant investigation into this issue. Since then, it has also been the last.
This is not for lack of talent on Cheney’s part. If a bit over-wrought at times, Body Brokers is engaging, fast-paced, and informative without being didactic. Most readers will be surprised that for-profit companies facilitate a large part of a non-profit tissue or body donation. And these companies make an, erm, killing off of them. When a person agrees to donate their body or tissue following their death, this material is distributed to medical supply companies and universities around the country.
[Continued]
Full SevenPonds review:
http://blog.sevenponds.com/lending-in...
This is not for lack of talent on Cheney’s part. If a bit over-wrought at times, Body Brokers is engaging, fast-paced, and informative without being didactic. Most readers will be surprised that for-profit companies facilitate a large part of a non-profit tissue or body donation. And these companies make an, erm, killing off of them. When a person agrees to donate their body or tissue following their death, this material is distributed to medical supply companies and universities around the country.
[Continued]
Full SevenPonds review:
http://blog.sevenponds.com/lending-in...
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