The Bones of Medicine

During a recent trip to the Poonjab, I haunted the local medical school to review some anatomy in their medical school Anatomy Museum. Many med schools out there have museums set up of specimen for their students to review structures.

While hanging out in the sweltering sticky Indian summer heat, sans air conditioning, with various preserved limbs and organs was appetizing enough, what really creeped me out was imagining the original owners of the body parts. All the arms and legs were well-tanned, skinny, muscular little limbs. The organs seemed healthy but not the most nourished. These bodies sure didn't look like the roly-poly aunties and uncles bursting over their knickers with Punjabi paunch.

Afterwards I asked my father where the school had collected all the museum pieces. He said that the majority were from riksha drivers, the unclaimed unnamed riksha drivers for whom the state didn't find a next of kin.

I met some local med students out there also and to top off the macabre and treading on unethical approach to the human form, the majority of students kept a box of real human bones in their dorm rooms. And they OWNED them!

I was mildly excited at the prospect of having such an awesome anatomy resource at onces fingertips, until common decency once again inhabited my indecent mind.

Today an article emerged about this "bones" industry in India. Grave thieves! Not only are the thieves stealing bones from Muslim graves, but also from Hindu crematorium sites, before the bodies are burnt. Equal opportunity harvesting?

A source informs me that in his medical school in India, the rumor among students is that the bones are from people in Bihar murdered specifically to harvest their bones.

Of course, this twisted money-making scheme happens out here too. And I'm sure most blood donors would be aghast to know that in some parts of the country, their blood products are being sold for profit to plasma wholesalers and the pharmaceutical industry. The body is a hot commodity.

It is amazing the propensity of the medical system to create such a disturbing and unethical blackmarket industry in various forms worldwide, and yet this is all in the name of science, so this disrespect of the human body and its organs, is white-washed under the moral straight-jacket we call medicine.