"You are a little soul carrying around a corpse." --Epictetus
"Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will follow." --Matthew 24:28
Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts.
Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these "body brokers" capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000.
As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course of three years, when there's that much money to be made with no federal regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are willing to employ questionable practices--from deception and outright theft--to acquire, market and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons. In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where fresh torsos are delivered in Igloo coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room normally used for banquets. "That torso that you're living in right now is just flesh and bones to me. To me, it's a product," says the New Jersey-based broker presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the "resurrectionists" of the nineteenth century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home, crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities.
Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way of death, Body Brokers is both a captivating work of first-person reportage and a surprising inside look at a little-known aspect of the "death care" world.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

Enlightening, YES. Bookworthy, NO.:

"When you donate your body, you've given up the right to choose how it will be used" and "Leaving your loved ones with a funeral home may expose them to unscrupulous body parts dealers". That basically sums up the book.
The first 1/3 of the book is an interesting (and disturbing) foray into the US body parts trade and the legal and illegal aspects of it. Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't build upon the first part and is simply backstory for how the investigations were done. Interesting, but... more info

Very interesting ... Could have been better:

I hadn't read much of the book before I thought that this book went into what Mary Roach's Stiff did not go into - exactly where cadavers come from. And this is exactly what the book is about - it is not about how useful and valuable cadavers are to medicine (read "Stiff" if that's what you're looking for) and it is not telling people NOT to donate their bodies. This book simply illuminates how/where a fair percentage of bodies and parts come to be part of medical science - she is not saying that this is... more info

Not worth the price.:

This treatment of a serious topic does a tremendous disservice to all those patients, families and health professionals that recognize the vital need for donated organs and tissues for therapy and medical research. This will appeal to those who regularly obtain all their medical information from Grey's Anatomy.
The author sensationalizes the fringe, to the detriment of the exceptional work being performed by scientists and medical researchers who are trying to move the field forward. Yes, the scandals... more info

Dissecting the body trade:

A human head might bring in seven or eight hundred dollars, a spine at least as much again. Shoulders, knees, bones, brains, various viscera--pretty much every part of a dead body can be sold off if the corpse is fresh enough. The demand for material is high: medical schools and medical device companies and surgical skills workshops need bodies or body parts for dissection, and willed body programs don't produce enough corpses to go around. That's why, shocking though it is, there is apparently a robust... more info

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