When is it OK to display bodies without the consent of the deceased? *Trigger warning* Story and graphic images.

Question

🏁When, if ever, in your opinion is it okay to display human remains in a museum setting without the consent of the deceased?               Bonus: What if the living relatives give consent to display the remains at the time of death? What if the remains have significant scientific or historical relevance and relatives don't give consent?

Story Ahead-Trigger warning👻👻👻👻👻👻

Also, this story will be told from vague memory so if someone has corrections feel free to add. I would put it in the Spooky Stories room but there's 0 traffic and we need something new to discuss. Enjoy!👻👻👻👻

In the good ol' 1800s, a 18 year old seamstress commits suicide via river. She was said to "be plagued by an amorous delusion". In other words, she possibly liked someone that 1800's society said she couldn't or was a rape victim. Could have ment anything.

Anyway, some guy at the local university happens to be looking for fresh bodies to practice his new preservation technique. Guess who he finds...

Professor FreakShow obtains her body somehow. He makes a plaster cast of her then proceeds to scalp her, skins her from the bust up and puts the skin over the plaster cast. Them slaps her scalp back on and pats himself on the back.

Problem was she had tears in her face from where some jackass had poked at her with a spear trying to fish her out of the river. And since apparently sewing them shut was too normal, he takes artistic liberty...

He uses the same technique with some snakes he had on hand and makes this poor dead girl a lesson about suicide. Because we're talking about a people who think suicide is the ultimate sin... *No names mentioned*...

Dude puts her bust on sticks, makes the snakes look like they're eating her face (to cover the holes) and uses red candle wax for blood. So what is left of this child looks like she's suffering in hell, assumedly. Straight up Halloween prop/Dark Souls crap.

But wait, there's more!

So first thing dude does is take it to the girls mourning parents, like he's their replacement kid and he wants his art on the fridge. According to him, they praise him for it. They're in mourning, their daughter was skinned and turned into a message about the threats of damnation... But apparently they liked his work on their daughter who just threw herself off a bridge a few days before. If that wasn't shocking enough, all the girl's buddies also liked her new look. Between a crap love life and incredibly weird parents, she didn't have great choice in friends either.

After that this guy takes her head to a exhibition in Paris. Wins all the things. People loved it. FYI this happened during the Civil War in the US, so not really that long ago. She's still on display somewhere in a museum. Can't remember where. Here comes her picture. I genuinely wished I new this girl's name. If you know it please comment.

Answer

Mummies on display in a museum I'm ok with. Body worlds exhibit where the people give consent before they die I'm ok with. That's also educational. Even shrunken heads are really creepy, but I'm still ok with because it is historical/culturally educational. But this is trying to be some sick kind of art that I'm not ok with. Even if her parents were ok with it, it's still messed up.

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I think there's a big difference between having scientific specimens on display in museums and creating the monstrosity that this guy made...

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I think this is pretty sick. I mean today I think that dude would face a crime of indecently interfering with a dead body. But I generally think unless you have consent of the individual beforehand (which I can't imagine happening too often) or if it's a cultural norm to somehow display the deceased. This seems weird though. The parents liked his work? Wtf lol. If someone showed up at my door with my dead child like that, I'd be pissed and creeped out.

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She is DEAD and I feel BAD for her wth 
This is horrible wtf was wrong with people

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Oh this reminded me of a story from my college. There WAS this science teacher that worked here, I'm assuming, in the lateeee 1900s. Well, he'd get dead bodies and PUT THEM ON THE ROOF OF THE SCHOOL! He'd lay them there to dry out, then take them down so that he could get the bones. I kid you not, this is 100% true 😖😖😖

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I say it is only okay to display a dead body if the person had consented before death

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I dont agree with this at all.

I am not much *okay* with it being used for learning purposes neither.

I know it is necessary, but the bodies are from homeless people without family. We dont know if they wanted to have several hands inside them after death. Maybe their body had a religious meaning for them.

In my med school a girl once recognized her grandmother in one of the bodies we were studying, who had disappeared several years ago. It was an awful situation.

Answer

Padova, Italy. 1863

One ash-grey morning, a young girl jumped into the muddy waters of the river which ran just behind the city hospital. We do not know her name, only that she worked as a seamstress, that she was 18 years old, and that her act of suicide was in all probability provoked by “amorous delusion”.

A sad yet rather unremarkable event, one that history could have well forgotten – hadn’t it happened, so to speak, in the right place and time.

The city of Padova was home to one of the oldest Universities in history, and it was also recognized as the cradle of anatomy. Among others, the great Vesalius, Morgagni and Fallopius had taught medicine there; in 1595 Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente had the first stable anatomical theater built inside the University’s main building, Palazzo del Bo.

In 1863, the chair of Anatomical Pathology at the University was occupied by Lodovico Brunetti (1813-1899) who, like many anatomists of his time, had come up with his own process for preserving anatomical specimens: tannization. His method consisted in drying the specimens and injecting them with tannic acid; it was a long and difficult procedure (and as such it would not go on to have much fortune) but nonetheless gave astounding results in terms of quality. I have had the opportunity of feeling the consistency of some of his preparations, and still today they maintain the natural dimensions, elasticity and softness of the original tissues.

But back to our story.

When Brunetti heard about the young girl’s suicide, he asked her body be brought to him, so he could carry out his experiments.

First he made a plaster cast of the her face and upper bust. Then he peeled away all of the skin from her head and neck, being especially careful as to preserve the girl’s beautiful golden hair. He then proceeded to treat the skin, scouring it with sulfuric ether and fixing it with his own tannic acid formula. Once the skin was saved from putrefaction, he laid it out over the

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girl’s features, then added glass eyes and plaster ears to his creation.

But something was wrong.

The anatomist noticed that in several places the skin was lacerated. Those were the gashes left by the hooks men had used to drag the body out of the water, unto the banks of the river.

Brunetti, who in all evidence must have been a perfectionist, came up with a clever idea to disguise those marks.

He placed some wooden branches beside her chest, then entwined them with tannised snakes, carefully mounting the reptiles as if they were devouring the girl’s face. He poured some red candle wax to serve as blood spurts, and there it was: a perfect allegory of the punishment reserved in Hell to those who committed the mortal sin of  suicide.

He called his piece The Punished Suicide.

Answer

You don't own your dead body, the ownership depends on where your body ends up. In this case her body is public so anyone can do that to it if they aren't violating any local laws in the process.

When is it OK to display bodies without the consent of the deceased? Trigger warning Story and graphic images.

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