Got Bones?

The Bone Room in California seems a legit place to purchase bones: skeletons of all sorts, including humans. Among the many touchy subjects that make up anatomy, this one is, well, touchy. In the eyes of most laws, and suprising to many, it's OK to possess human bones - they're "mineral". It's the movement and procurement of them that makes this touchy.

This kid is guarding the grave of a family member

Most human skeletons, at least over the last 40-50 years have come from India. They have a fairly facile, slightly european structure, and you'll notice certain things that might indicate poverty or hardship, like anemia and stunting. India is cool, India is straight up and civilized, so what's so bad about Indian skeletons. Ah, it's where they come from in India and how they're procured there that makes this interesting. Over the past 15 years or so, skeletons have become pretty rare commodities. I think there's something like a 4 year wait for one now and you'll pay around 4-5G. That's a lot. This is because, in the past 15 years India has really clamped down on their bone industry. And this is because their bone industry is a bit of a black market. It gets it's bones by grave robbing. This is a little like the 19th century: no corpse is safe. Once dead and buried, the bodies are quickly dug up and, uh, rendered in innocuous little workshops in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Imagine the smell. No wonder India has cracked down in this. It's lucrative. When every western medical school needs skeletons, it simply becomes a supply and demand thing. And it's disturbing. My colleague, an anthropologist, has described the skulls in some collections he has seen as having "pot shine" on their occipital protuberance. This, he explains, is where the back of the skull rubs against the metal pot while being boiled. Nice image, that. Of interest, I got an e-mail from a medical illustrator on the AMI listserv explaining that the first skeleton they had purchased, some years ago, from India for their studio had a bullet hole through the sternum. They promptly returned it.

So. Is there a better way? For the sake of the mental exercise we could DIY some skeletons in our own lab from our own bequeathed bodies. We do have an agreement with the donor families that we can keep certain parts indefinitely, be they rare or really interesting from an educational standpoint. The rest of the body we cremate, in such cases, and return to the family. We don't like doing this and when we do, we try to return as much as we possibly can. Without the skeleton, though, there just wouldn't be much to return, period. And we can't/won't do that. However, for whatever reason, some families don't actually want the cremated remains returned. We could possibly get a skeleton from one of those cadavers. No problems there. Now that brings us back to rendering and that smell. We're in a hospital and people complain enough when they catch a whif of cadaver chemicals outside our lab. Imagine what would happen if we tried to render a cadaver.

In our region of the world, we are governed by the chief coroner. The CC is incredibly powerful in terms of what institutions they can shut down for investigation. The CC also technically "owns" the cadavers we use to teach with in each of the medical schools within our region, and before we use a donated body, we must get written permission from the CC office do so. (I'm not saying if it's a state or shire or province). The CC has a lot on their plate and they don't really want to deal with anatomy departments if they can avoid it. Therefor, the CC's guiding rule for us is: use your best judgement, and don't you dare create a PR nightmare for our office.

...It's the visual, stupid.

And besides, I don't want to be the one who does the rendering.

For an interesting read/listen, NPR did a great piece on the Indian bone trade a while ago. You can listen to it here