On Loan: Understanding the Cadaver as Quasi Property
Friday, October 13, 2023
3:15 PM – 4:30 PM ET
Location: Essex C (Fourth Floor)
From the exclusive dissection of convicted criminals to the modern notion of donating one’s body as an anatomical gift, medicine’s understanding of and relationship to the cadaver has undergone several significant transitions. Following legal precedent, the current study suggests a novel transition: one positing that the offered body, properly understood, may be more precisely described as “on loan” than as “gift.” This study employs doctrinal methodology and historical analysis to develop a novel conceptualization of the cadaver.
In Pierce v. Proprietors of Swan Point Cemetery, the court characterized the dead body as quasi property “to which certain persons may have rights, as they have duties to perform towards it arising out of our common humanity. But the person having charge of it cannot be the owner…” While an individual in life may decide to offer her body for anatomical study in death, ownership can neither be transferred to nor claimed by the anatomists and medical students who learn from the body. Therefore, the body cannot strictly be understood as a gift. Under the proposed conceptualization of the body as a loan to be returned, attention is due to the condition in which medical students leave the body after anatomical dissection. If medicine is to understand and aim for health as wholeness (after Wendell Berry, who notes that “health” shares the same etymological root as “whole”), it must demand technical excellence in dissection, and restoration of the dissected body to the extent that wholeness is achievable.
Bryan Pilkington – Department of Philosophy – Seton Hall University