We shot the bodies last night. Actually, they were already dead. We’re going to shoot them again today.
Since we were only armed with cameras, we shot video, and since we lacked basic directing and casting skills, the stars of the show were cadavers. We had brought together crew and equipment and lifeless bodies in the name of science, a training opportunity for the living taught through the physical characteristics of the dead. It was graphically interesting.
We were hired to tell an anatomical story, to be used as a physician training tool, by filming an expert discussing anatomy as she dissected and exposed various parts of the human body. I’d been down this road before, but it had been awhile and I couldn’t help but consider the logistics.
Our client purchased two cadavers. They weren’t bought at retail. People donate their bodies, their whole bodies, to science; it’s not as popular as individual organ donation, but it still happens, somewhere in the range of 20,000 times a year in the U.S. For the most part, supply can’t keep pace with demand and most of these bodies are used by the country’s medical schools. There are of course other ways to acquire a corpse. At any moment in time in the United States, there are as many as 100,000 unclaimed bodies in county morgues. Most institutions of learning and legitimate research organizations now frown upon using a body other than the ones specifically designated for this service, but the unclaimed still sometimes get drafted into service.
Of course, these bodies have to be paid for. When someone dies and that person has opted to donate his physical container for the greater good, the body has to be preserved in a certain way within a certain time period. Most of the time this means embalming, but embalming hardens the tissue and changes its texture, so in cases that require the tissue to be maintained in a more natural state, bodies are frozen, to a temperature of -20 degrees Celsius. Anyway, the people doing this preservation need to be paid, and if you want the whole body, they will part with one for around $1,000. If the body parts are divvied up, its organs and appendages isolated for sale individually, a single body could be worth ten times that. It’s illegal to sell body parts in America, but somebody has to do this processing, and demand is high and, well, it all ends up feeling pretty gruesome.
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The day before we were to film our science project, a gal known as an anatomist was hard at work. She was a senior and not a high school senior. Remember that coroner show Quincy? Well, his grandma. She was actually very cool and smart, unflappable, and she was preparing the bodies for this anatomy lesson by pulling back the skin of the cadavers in multiple key places.
The room was essentially a garage, a sterile, medically-equipped, optimized-for-cadaver-filming garage. It smelled awful, the industrial, sanitized version of awful. They know that there’s going to be a stench, so they mask the stench with chemicals, but you anticipate stench, your mind actually processes stench, so the result is a psychological stench with a chemical coating. Gag!
Quincy’s grandma has a GoPro mounted on her forehead and she’s delivering an anatomical play-by-play into a headset mike as if she was demonstrating how to cook chicken in a wok at Costco. In some instances, she had neatly pulled back the skin to reveal the intricate meshwork of what was beneath and in other cases, it appeared that to get at the point of interest, it required a more forceful excavation that was not so neat and tidy. She was continuously pruning the cadavers, pulling back and trimming and grooming the skin so that the view of the anatomy underneath it was unobstructed. She was rapidly filling a metal bowl with skins scraps and spare parts as she went. In addition to us and the anatomist, there was a gentleman in a neat black suit. Under different circumstances, you would have mistaken him for a mortician, but he was employed by our client. It was clear that he was with the “patients,” that is, the cadavers, and later we learned that he had escorted them to the garage film set and was there to ensure there was no dead people funny business. The filming took place over the course of about nine hours. Our gray-haired narrator provided expert perspective and our cadavers willingly revealed their innermost secrets, and in the end, maybe a physician sometime, somewhere will provide more effective patient care as
The filming took place over the course of about nine hours. Our gray-haired narrator provided expert perspective and our cadavers revealed their innermost secrets, and in the end, maybe a physician will provide more effective patient care as a result. We couldn’t have done it without the stellar performance of those who, literally, have gone before us. In fact, a great deal of the medical and scientific progress we’ve made as a species is the result of the unselfishness of this very small group of donors. Theirs is a generous and brave act indeed.