If your body is resting in the anatomical morgue at Maine’s only medical school, you’re in for a honorarium, albeit a low-key affair.
Or at least your relatives are.
The University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine will be holding its annual body-donation memorial service in Portland on Sept. 14.
The event “is an annual, community-centered gathering to acknowledge the priceless contribution of the people who have donated their bodies to the university,” school officials said.
A non-denominational service will include short speeches by the college’s dean, medical and health-science students involved directly with the anatomical donors, and members of the clergy.
The event “provides a wonderful and rare opportunity for students to mingle with the friends and families of the anatomical donors who have left an indelible mark on their blossoming medical careers,” the school said.
Meanwhile, the selfless who donate themselves to medical science will no longer have to worry that they might end up, nameless or otherwise, on public display in a museum.
An historically-famous anatomical museum in Philadelphia has announced it is pulling the plug on anonymous body parts.
Under its new policy, the Mutter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia will only accept donations from living donors or from their descendants, to help identify them.
The museum has often put unidentified body parts, or parts identified only by the donors’ initials, on public display.
Museum visitors “can view a vast medical library with human skulls, wax moldings of skin conditions, medical tools and more,” its website says.
In some cases anatomical anomalies at the museum have been recreated in wax, such as that of Madame Dimanche, a Paris woman born with a horn growing out of her forehead.
The museum is also doing away with its annual Halloween party, which was known as “Mischief At The Mutter.” (Now there’s a museum with a sense of humor. Or at least one that had a sense of humor.)
The museum’s decision to go cold turkey on humor is drawing stiff criticism from Stanley Goldfarb, one of its former directors.
Goldfarb published a scathing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal condemning “cancel culture” and accusing “a handful of woke elites” of jeopardizing the museum’s future.
But not to worry in Maine – the upcoming party will be a muted, respectful affair, lest it be confused for an early Halloween party. (No ghouls and goblins like Mutter Mischief.)
The extent of celebration at the staid Portland service will be what the school is calling “light refreshments.”
