Epilogue: Trafficking the Human Body: Late Modern Cannibalism

Abstract

Belief in the capacity of the human body to heal is the driving force of Western corpse pharmacology and the medical trade in human bodies and bodily matter; this is just as true of today’s medical market as it was in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This supposition is also the raison d’être of the Catholic belief in the salvific power of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. As we have seen, the practice and rhetoric of the human body fragmented and trafficked as medicine produces multi-layered imagery of bodily consumptions (a term that slips readily between using and eating), which is cannibalistic in its suggestiveness. All of the writers discussed in the previous chapters owe a great deal to the scope and versatility of this imagery in their representations of the body across a range of consumptions: vengeful, political, therapeutic, economic, religious, erotic, and sexual. Further, as I discuss in the introduction, the consumption of the human body in the twenty-first-century medical trade also gives rise to the imagery of cannibalism. And it is the cannibalistic nature of this trade, in its frequent transgression of moral and ethical limits, which inspires the desire to sensationalize in much of the media coverage with which we have become familiar.

In some parts of South Africa today cornea, heart valve, liver, and skin grafts are harvested from the victims of violent deaths (most of them homicides and transport accidents) without the knowledge or consent of family members).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Theft of Life: The Globalization of Organ Stealing Rumours”¹

In 1994 the public was shocked once again: by the revelation that materials were being removed from cadavers in hospital morgues and sold to pharmaceutical companies. Pathology workers removed materials such as dura mater, whole brains, pituitary glands, connective tissue, bones of the extremities and the inner ear, and other tissues and gave or sold them either to brokers or directly to pharmaceutical and other firms. This practice had been going on for many years in Germany and other countries, stimulated by the growing demand for human material for research and for processing into other products.

Linda F. Hogle, Recovering the Nation’s Body