Trafficking a corpse is not easy. Selling it to a university, which has established a protocol for its anatomical study, is not either. Although there are different nuances between the formulas used by university centers in Spain, they are all very similar and are based on two premises: the altruism of the person who gives their body to science and the free nature of this act, since the law establishes that there cannot be an economic benefit involved.
The Spanish Anatomical Society (SAE) establishes that the donation must have been completed by the volunteer using a form in which they declare that, once deceased, they donate their body for anatomical study and research at a university. At the end of this registration, the person is given a card that can be used to notify the university upon his death that one of his donors has died.
What happened in Valencia is “ethically terrifying and illegal,” says Alberto Prats, director of the Body Donation Service of the Clinical Campus of the University of Barcelona (UB). This university center has established three days a week in which potential donors must present themselves to make their donation to science effective.
“For us,” Prats explains, “it is the donor himself who is the only one who can make the donation. The conditions are explained to him, that he is altruistic, and he is offered to sign. We give him a card and we also explain to him that at any time he can call and unsubscribe.”
With requirements of this type, what happened in Valencia sounds like an exceptional anomaly. In some cases, not even the bodies of donors registered by a university are claimed for use in anatomical studies because the relatives or the funeral home do not call the teaching center to notify that the person has died and can take care of the body. . The costs of transporting the body to the Faculty of Medicine are borne by the university.
The University of Barcelona currently has a registry of 15,000 people who have declared their willingness to donate their body to science. The study of the bodies of deceased people is a great benefit for the study of Medicine, necessary for students’ practices.
The person in charge of the donation service of the UB at the Campus Clínic considers it strange, as in the case presented in Valencia, that someone would take care of the body of a deceased that no one claims, because the centers do not accept it “if it is not donated.” the body in a voluntary way.” He also indicates that the body is donated to a single institution and that it cannot be transferred to another.
For the body of a deceased person to reach a dissection table, a series of technical requirements must also be met that also limit the suitability of a corpse for study. Universities only accept the donation of whole bodies that have not passed the coroner’s table for an autopsy. Nor in the event that organs such as kidneys have been removed from the corpse. It is a question of conservation. By intervening on a body, the conditions that allow its conservation to be used in university studies can be modified.
Other conditions for the disposal of corpses by medical schools are possible infectious diseases that could be present at the time of death, such as coronavirus or hepatitis, malformations of a certain entity, or extreme conditions of obesity or thinness. Not just anyone is accepted to be dissected.
