BODY BROKERS(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　“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.