Like any necromancer, I’ve dreamed of building an empire of the dead. Or maybe at least a nice bone tower—I don’t support colonialism, and I’ve never felt cut out for government administration. So it came as a surprise even to me when I started plotting a cadaver revolution that involves…grant writing.
I’ve written before about tissue donation, mostly in a facile way describing the challenges it creates for embalmers. (There is nothing facile about embalming a bone donor, I promise.) What I didn’t go into was whole body donation. Whole body donation—or anatomical donation, as it will be recorded on your death certificate—means donating your body to science. Mary Roach discusses this in her book Stiff, which I still haven’t read yet, despite owning a copy.
When I started my Gross Anatomy class in mortuary school, we took a field trip to the University of Texas at San Antonio to pick up our cadavers from their anatomical donation program. I had no idea how anatomical embalming worked, and no exposure yet to traditional embalming with which to compare. We spent that semester dissecting those cadavers and memorizing a truly unholy number of muscles, ligaments, and vessels. One of our cadavers had an unusual pathological heart condition, and many nursing students filed through like ducklings to marvel at it. In Texas, mortuary schools are allowed to embalm for funeral homes, so that Gross Anatomy lab was my only exposure to anatomical donation while in school.
In Virginia, funeral service programs can obtain cadavers only from the State Anatomical Program. VSAP provides cadavers to all the medical and allied health programs that offer wet labs. Although VSAP is a state agency, they’re entirely self-funded, which means they recoup operational expenses through the sale of cadavers. I begrudge them not one obol, and their laboratory manager certainly deserves a raise. The problem, though, is that cadavers are expensive, and I work at a poor community college. The more our cadavers cost, the more fuss we get about our yearly budget.
I keep threatening to give our business office a lecture about Burke and Hare, but my dean hasn’t signed off on it yet.
Not every medical system or health program has the facilities to maintain a wet lab, so occasionally bartering occurs. We share some cadavers with another program, they trade us a bag of flour and a goat, etc. Sharing our lab facilities with community partners always makes the college feel nice. My office is next door to the EMS Program Director’s, and I’ve made an alliance between first and last responders. Their students get to practice lifesaving procedures on something besides a dummy or a chicken leg, and my students get to learn about all the things they’ll encounter when EMS fails to save a particular life.
My networking attempts started as a way to potentially increase the number of cadavers I can order in a semester, so I don’t have to share one body amongst fifteen students like a beleaguered carrion bird feeding too many fledglings. It turns out, though, that I feel quite passionately about cadaver labs and access thereto. Some people dream of donating their body to science and helping find a cure for cancer, or some other specific disease–and that is a valid dream. But donating your body and helping a class full of surgical students better understand anatomy is equally valid. Or helping a class of EMS students learn to place an IO port without flinching, or intubate a patient smoothly, or perform a cricothyroidotomy or thoracostomy in the field to keep someone alive until they get to the hospital. I will always argue for the importance of deathcare in any field, whether nursing or mortuary science, but even those morticians who denigrate funeral embalming might have a hard time explaining why medical students shouldn’t learn on a real human body.
As part of my Master’s of Public Health program, I took a Project Management for Public Health class. If that sounds joyless to you, it did to me as well. Luckily, the class focused on grant writing, and the professor was delightful. My mock grant proposal for the semester was pursuing a cadaver grant (at least one exists!) to start an anatomical research alliance. I have no idea how realistic this enterprise is, but I’m just a necromancer with a big dream. A job for every corpse; a cadaver for every school!
Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.