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.
Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished.
On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”
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A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.
Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.
An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.
In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.
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“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” [Bioethicist Eli Shupe] said.
Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”
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After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color.
“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”
“who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed”
they didn’t even fucking GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO CLAIM THEIR DEAD
It is absolutely equivalent to grave robbing. As bad as grave robbing. Just without the “middleman” bit of burying them first, because they want to dodge the expense, that’s the point.
It’s especially disgusting because these people would overwhelmingly have been disadvantaged in terms of getting health care while they were alive. To then be used as a teaching aid and have the very effects of that lack of care turned into an educational opportunity for a profession that, itself, is rife with discrimination against the poor, POC, the unhoused, the unhealthy, the disabled, the mentally ill, those with substance use problems, perpetuating the cycle that might have failed the person in the first place and contributed to their demise…. Yeah. Also, a lot of people are victims of medical abuse and probably would be upset, like me, at the idea of this happening to them. I’m already a walking crime scene, ffs, don’t make that worse.
Also, this? If I wanted to donate my body for education or research (I don’t and my paperwork reflects this) this would make me reluctant because even though I might be willing, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a place that does this, even if I were dead. I literally would not be caught dead supporting them.
And while *I* know how the organ donation process works for transplants and am not worried about coming to harm because I am a donor (please please learn about it and become a donor, please), a lot of people don’t trust the process and are misinformed, and you can’t tell me this sort of shit is not going to affect those fears. It’s the same sort of callousness.
It also gives HUGE motive for those same companies to lobby *against* social assistance programs.
If it’s more expensive to ethically source voluntarily donated remains than it is to buy a congressman who can shut down mental health access and homeless shelters so they can scoop up society’s most vulnerable as they fall by the wayside, I don’t think we’d be surprised to see things go that way.
Protectibe the sanctity of human bodies isn’t *just* a matter of practicality and efficiency. It’s also a foundational step in ensuring the sanctity of the *living*.
ALT