Susan E Lederer, Susan C Lawrence
By the mid-1950s, formal body donation programs began to supplant the decades-long reliance on the anatomy acts that made the bodies of the indigent and unclaimed available for medical education and research. By the mid-1980s, nearly all American medical schools relied on voluntary anatomical gifts of dead bodies. Throughout the nineteenth century, a handful of Americans requested through wills, letters, and suicide notes that their corpses be given to doctors and medical schools. The dramatic expansion of American newspapers after the Civil War helped establish bequeathing one's body as an available, albeit eccentric, afterlife...
2022: Bulletin of the History of Medicine