Body event's ethics just don't stack up

MEDICAL MATTERS: I SEE the Human Bodies exhibition is back in town and if my inbox is any indication, it is causing some unease. Personally, the show bothers me almost as much as it did in 2009, when it first visited these shores.

According to Cheryl Mure, the exhibition’s educational director, the educational value of the controversial exhibition of dead people whose personal origins are unknown outweighs concerns about the derivation of the bodies.

People “should follow their own beliefs” when considering whether to visit it. She has no qualms about possible ethical issues as “all the bodies have been legally donated”.

I can see the educational value of such an exhibition. As Fintan O’Toole has observed, “Moving through these anatomical layers, there is an accumulating sense of disbelief that all of this complexity could not merely function, but do so for billions of people every day. You start to become conscious of your breath, of your heartbeat, of your pulse. You get a very direct sense of how remarkable it is that you, or anybody else, exists at all.”

Which is exactly the feeling appreciated every year by medical students beginning the study of human anatomy. So why not facilitate an appreciation of the wonders of the human body for a much wider audience? As long as all ethical and legal issues surrounding the bodies stack up, there is no reason.

However, this exhibition has major question marks hanging over it. The organisers say all the bodies were provided to a laboratory at the Medical University of Dalian in northeast China, by the city morgue. Even if the people whose bodies are now on display had died from natural causes, from where they came remains an issue. Were they donated to medical science before death by means of informed consent? Did their relatives give permission for the bodies to be used in this way?

In 2008, an investigation by the New York attorney general into a similar exhibition concluded: “There is no written record that any of those persons consented to the plastination and exhibition of their bodies. Rather, those bodies were unclaimed at death, collected by the Chinese Bureau of Police, and delivered to the Dalian Medical University and other universities in China for education and research.”

Without clear-cut documentary evidence of consent, I could not attend this kind of exhibition. Before Christmas a prominent medical ethicist called for the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the "Irish giant", which has been displayed at the Royal College of Surgeons in London for almost 200 years, to be buried according to his original wishes. Writing in the British Medical Journal,Prof Len Doyal said complete information about the acquisition of his skeleton should be provided "so that visitors can make a more informed judgment about the moral implications and appropriateness of its continued display".

Similar cases come to mind. There has been debate over the propriety of the anatomical atlas of Austrian Eduard Pernkopf, when it was demonstrated that concentration camp victims were murdered for dissection and depiction in that atlas. It’s possible that some anatomical preparations in these islands may have been derived from subjects who were murdered to order.

There is of course a contrarian view. Responding to the BMJ article, a group of UK anthroplogists said, “apologising for the deeds of others long dead will serve only to salve the consciences of the living whilst having no effect on the deceased. In short, we cannot change the past, but it is fundamental to learn from it. We can only change the future and dropping Charles Byrne’s bones into the sea will help no one – not even Charles Byrne, and certainly not future generations.”

LP Hartley observed: “The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there.” Civilisations move on. But as my fellow columnist Des O’Neill has said, ethical issues such as this affect modern events, such as the retained organ scandals, and may promote an insensitivity to the human body after death.