Glob-a-log

(Body snatcher Michael Mastromarino)

Now, here’s an interesting story for you – but first, let me digress a bit and tell you a dark tale from England’s Victorian England, from around the time Jack the Ripper’s footsteps could be heard in some very dark and bloody alley and neighbours complained about the endless coughing of Sherlock Holmes’ pipe in the middle of the night. (Well, Scotland really, not England but the sound of a pipe can carry a long way when the rest of the world is trying to sleep.)

Anyway, without even more garrulous ado, let me give you the notorious messires Burke and Hare:

Before 1832, an insufficient supply of legitimate cadavers was available for the study and teaching of anatomy in British medical schools. As medical science began to flourish in the early 19th century, demand rose sharply, but at the same time, the only legal supply of cadavers – the bodies of executed criminals – was falling due to a sharp reduction in the execution rate in the early 19th century, as compared with the 18th century. This situation attracted criminal elements who were willing to obtain specimens by any means. The activities of body-snatchers (also called resurrectionists) gave rise to particular public fear and revulsion.

The Burke and Hare murders were perpetrated in Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828 primarily by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses of their 17 victims to the Edinburgh Medical College for dissection.

Okay, let’s say goodbye to the 19th century, Sherlock Holmes’ pipe and all those grisly old tales about serial murderers and body snatchers and move to present day Philadelphia, where things like that simply don’t happen.

You’re not buying that, are you?

Very wise. Times may change but human nature does not – and if you can make a fast buck digging up and selling on the bodies of your fellow man, well, business is business, and even people who don’t believe in old-fashioned ghosts will be willing to admit that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

So, here’s the story of Michael Mastromarino, a latter day Hare – or resurrected Burke:

A man who made millions of dollars by plundering hundreds of bodies sent to funeral homes and selling their often-diseased parts and tissues to medical companies pleaded guilty Friday to a raft of charges that could send him to prison for life. Michael Mastromarino, 44, of Fort Lee, N.J., pleaded guilty. The bodies were sold around the country for dental implants, knee and hip replacements and other procedures. About 10,000 people received tissue supplied by Mastromarino’s company, New Jersey’s Biomedical Tissue Services.

Mastromarino went into business with James McCafferty and brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone because they collectively owned a crematorium. He paid them $245,000 for at least 244 cadavers between February 2004 and October 2005. Mastromarino would then send a “cutting” crew, led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

Okay, I know it’s very wrong of me but I must confess I do find stories like this irresistibly funny – though even I have to admit there are a few serious lessons to be learnt from this story.

Obviously, Mastromarino and his associates are despicable bottom feeders who probably deserve whatever the mighty state will throw at them. Still, there is that huge market out there for all those body parts – and that is both silly and, in fact, almost criminal in itself.

Because medical science has evolved so much, we can do, in theory, ever more to relieve the suffering of so many of the living. Problem is, for some of those treatments we still need human tissue and human (spare) body parts – and there are never enough of those around when we need them, because they are rotting away in funeral parlours and crematories. All these useful bits are put in stupidly expensive garbage cans and buried, or burnt and put in much smaller (but still quite expensive) containers.

Which is a bloody waste, really.

Of course, people and their relatives should have the right to dispose of their dead bodies as they see fit and I’m not suggesting that any state should, as it were, nationalise these dead assets but surely it would make sense to change the laws to some extent, so that we don’t waste all these body parts for no good, private reason.

Right now, in most countries in the West at least, people have to state that they allow their bodies to be used after their death before they actually die. This means that almost nobody does this. People are people and they don’t like to dwell on what will happen to them after they die – Hell, they don’t even want to acknowledge that they will actually die at some point in the future. It’s the one thing we know that will happen to us and most of us don’t want to know. Which is why there are so few body donors, of course.

So, why not change the law and make it okay for your and my dead bodies to be used unless we state that we don’t want this? It would mean that people would not have to deal with the actual business of signing their body parts away – and I’m sure that many people who are not official donors now, wouldn’t mind if other people would find some use for these body parts when they, the previous owners, have no further use for them.

Forget about the broader issue for the moment. If you (yes, you!) have read this far, would you mind if your body would be used to help other people after your death – and, if you don’t mind, are you a donor already, or is that something you never got around to sign up for, thus far…?

Anyway, the argument against such a ‘default use’ law is that it might mean that people who don’t want their bodies to be used after their death, would somehow find themselves in that unwished for position. So, the argument goes that we shouldn’t change the law, in case some conscientious objectors might not have heard of this law or hadn’t come around to officially signing up as neigh-sayers. The other argument being that if other people are willing to donate their bodies after death, surely they could find the time to do so while they are alive.

I’ve already dealt with that second argument. Certainly, some people do become donors but most people just don’t want to think too much about their own mortality and all the things that come with it.

The first argument is, I think, quite specious. People who really do object to this proposal (and other forms of bodily interventions) will know about any law that deals with the subject and will most forcibly object to it, if they have that legal opportunity. I have heard of no case where a Jehovah’s Witness complained about not knowing about blood transfusions & vaccinations and/or taking a principled stance whenever one was offered.

In other words, right now we have a situation where millions of potential useful bodies go to waste for no good reason whatsoever – and I would argue that that’s just because our societies and we as persons are too morally lazy and squeamish to deal with this issue in a grown up manner.

I’m not saying that makes all of us as bad as the haplessly greedy Michael Mastromarino but isn’t the needless waste of all those potentially life enhancing and life saving body parts at least a moral crime?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 22:19 and is filed under Columns, Crime, Politics, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.