March 16, 2006
The Short Kiss GoodnightHealth and Medicine
How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. 
Burial is popular in the U.S., but a new book called Body Brokers makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it’s a triumph of capitalism:
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. [Link]The corpses — including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues — “are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers,” Cheney writes…
… she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools… their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor… she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone’s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day. [Link]
Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:
Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. [Link]
In an Instruction issued in 1926, the Holy Office [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as “a barbaric custom … a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead.” [Link]
Cremation also has non-theological issues. In India, some object because it destroys murder evidence. Even cops are perpetrators:
… the blatant murders continue behind the high walls of police stations, as it has now happened in the case of Harjeet Singh, a Dalit youth, in the Batala area. Here the policemen even cremated his body without following proper procedure… the police force still continues to be seeped in colonial mentality. Being true inheritors of the British legacy, they think that the only way to govern the country is through the use of brutal force. [Link]
And cremation of dental fillings was recently linked to toxic emissions in the UK:
Mercury is a highly toxic heavy metal that has been linked to damage to the brain and nervous system. It is estimated that crematoria release up to 16% of the UK’s total mercury emissions. [Link]
Parsis have customarily relied on vultures, but the bird population is dwindling:
In recent years, India’s vulture population is estimated to have declined by as much as 90 percent, which has affected the rituals surrounding the mortal remains at the towers of silence. In Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay and home to more than 50,000 of India’s 76,000 Parsis, the disposal of dead bodies is becoming a problem. Gone are the days when about 70 to 100 birds would swarm at the tower of silence. Today only a few birds come. [Link]But there’s a new, secure, environmentally-friendly solution on the horizon. It’s called promession, and it freeze-dries the corpse using liquid nitrogen. Han Solo knows:… conservationists are now warning that a drug [diclofenac] used to treat sick cows is killing the scavenging vultures by the millions. They say the drug is responsible for a 97 percent decline in the species over the past decade… [Link - thanks, WGIIA]
Promession involves freezing the body and coffin to -18C then dipping it in liquid nitrogen at -196C. Both body and coffin become so brittle that by the time they are placed on a vibrating pad, they disintegrate into a powder. A metal separator then picks out metals such as artificial hips and mercury dental fillings to be put in a biodegradable coffin.
The powder is put into a small box made of potato or corn starch and placed in a shallow grave, where it will disintegrate within six to 12 months. Relatives would then be encouraged to plant a tree on the grave which would feed off the compost formed from the body. [Link]
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
— Robert Frost, ‘Fire and Ice’
manish on March 16, 2006 05:37 PM in Environment, Health and Medicine, Religion · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
the late Alistair Cooke had his bones stolen by one of these gangs.
What does this mean for the self-immolators among us???
Neat post, Manish. The Xian/Muslim theology against cremations is based on a dubious theology of bodily resurrection, which seems to hold that an almighty Creator can't reconstitute a person's body without that body intact in the ground. So where does omnipotence work into that, I wonder?
It's pretty much gone by the wayside, though, in Protestant and most Catholic theology. I think Mel and the Gibsonites still believe in it, though.
Manish et al -
Congratulations on another interesting/relevant/compelling post.
No wonder Sepia has become an important part o my daily ritual. Keep up the great work. And please, pretty please, don't let the [richly deserved] praise go to your head or any other part of your body.
Also involved is the concept of returning the physical body to the five elements (panchabhutas) from it was originally created. Hence ashes are dissolved in sea, or holy river, etc.
thanks for a superbly informative post :)
if only it were that simple...each year hundreds of thousands of bodies are let into the ganges. this practice, in large part, has contributed to horrifying levels of pollution in the holy river.
its an issue of critical mass sometimes...when there are thousands of putrefying bodies in the ganges, increasing lack of space in urban cemeteries, the promession option seems to, at the moment, best address the concerns of both pro-immolators and anti-immolators...
AFAIK, the islamic reasons for burial doesn't have anything to do with resurrection. There is a notion in Islam that humans are originally created from soil and they should go back to soil upon death. Apart from that there are all the environmental reasons and so on often sited by muslims. But, most importantly I think these customs are products of the environment. Ancient hindus were mostly forest dwellers and finding enough wood to burn dead bodies was not difficult. Islam, on the other hand, flourished in the desert regions, followed what suited best for the deserts - burying the dead. Also islam didn't introduce any new way of burying people, they just followed what was before as introducing such big changes wouldn't have helped the success of the religion at that point.
veer bhadra mishra, the head priest at the Hanuman temple in Varanasi, is also an engineer who has come up with what he calls a wastewater oxidation pond system to help clean up the Ganga. it's been one of his prime aims in life, but he says bureaucracy and politicians always hinder his progress. time magazine named him one of their heroes for the planet.
Well, the problems always arise in (improper) practice. Consuming prime land resources for cemetaries (often bang in the middle of dense cities, like Bangalore) is also a huge problem in India. I was just explaining the religious idea behind cremation. The idea itself does not endorse throwing half-burnt bodies into rivers.
Najeeb,
Since Islam is known to have borrowed heavily from its cousins - Judaism and Christianity, that must have figured heavily in the decision to bury their dead.
Anandos,
I guess that's part of the whole Omnipotent God paradox ain't it? Can an omnipotent God create an unliftable rock?
southie-dadi,
omnipotent god paradox? Hmm. . . I've never really seen a paradox there. Are there unliftable rocks? One might say that the planets are themselves lifted and thrown about by our god the Divine Juggler and Master of Party Tricks.
anyhow, there's a whole Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (or was it Lost Ark?) thing here with instant decay of the corpse from freshly killed to dust in mere moments.
Or was that The Mummy?
and btw I'm with najeeb. I think God uses Occam's Razor to trim his eyebrows.
If i could control these matters, my policy will be with extracting anything you can from the dead, using them in experiments like these, or any other...fireproofing lotions for firefighters, any experiment which may help us out
Then we should take what ever is left and grind it into fine pieces burry It may make some good fertilizer or something like human bloodmeal along with animal. Or it may just go back to nature so that other life forms can use it for what ever they want to.
Or perhaps the whole world should set aside a place to bury them, When the next intellegent life form takes over from us.
Then they will use our remains to move around or lubricate mechanical invention or make hydrocarbon chains.
My friend and guestblogger Scotto recently expressed a desire to "go buffalo"--make sure that as much of his body is used as possible to benefit others--if possible, the whole thing. (This is a guy who spends a chunk of every other weekend getting platelets spun out of his blood, so he's keenly aware of the needs out there.) I would normally hope to be cremated, but considering the reasons for cremation (preventing the soul from hanging around, mournfully) total disassembly/recycling is rather appealing to me as well. Excessive profts, however, seem like a bad idea, as you never want to attach to great a money-incentive to having bodies pile up.
Hmm, I realized if you don't know what a platelets donation is, you wouldn't know that I mean he's keenly aware of the issues from a donor's perspective, not a recipient's perspective.
Well, there are also those of us with phobias about being buried while still alive. But really, I must say I take great comfort in the idea of finding some way for my death to help somebody. I can't imagine anything worse that dying pointlessly, and one way to avoid that would be for the body to be of use. I donate my old clothes and books and cars. Why would I need to bury my organs in in a safe-deposit box when I'm done with them?
Although such feeling do not extend to being an explosives crash-test dummy, even though it might be just as helpful, or even more so.
I should also acknowledge that AGREEING to be an organ donor is far away from BEING one. Jen Kahn's excellent article in WIRED describes just how exact the circumstance must be for donation to be possible.
'Many Hindus'? You mean there are some Hindus that don't practice cremation? Never heard of that before.
The Aghoris are cannibals.
sometimes Hindu children who haven't reached a certain age are buried, and there are sometimes exceptions for people who have died in a disaster. i always thought aghori sadhus were Hindus.
Thanks. I had never heard of any Hindu communities that did not practise cremation. As for the Hannibal Lecter method Manish links to above. Wow. You could dispose of the loved one with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Hindus generally frown upon burial, but sometimes exceptions are made for those who are expected to be reborn right away, such as children or people who died in disasters or tragic accidents. I think the thinking is that their souls did not have time to either develop enough or to complete a certain journey.
I want my ashes to be mixed with cocaine and snorted by my amigos.
vegans u may want to try
www.eathufu.com
Tony, say kemcho to my leetle friend.
This post makes me think about the recent interest created by Bodyworlds. I believe that there are about 6000 people on a waiting list for body donation after death. How's that for a disposal system? I'd be cool with being a biological specimen for learning...or would I?
Lol, I wish I had more time to write on this. There is a minor controversy going on here in the UK over nurials.
Some north england based Hindu and Sikh groups wanted permission to have open air burials / burnings because they say that burning inside a crematorium is not good enough. Or spiritually the soul does not get released or something. So the local authority initially said no, citing pollution and other concerns.
Then some people asked the Hindu Forum, which is like the biggest umbrella group of Hindus in the UK, who quite sensibly (which is rare) said that open air burials were not a requirement in Hinduism and therefore this group who wanted them had no real need for it. They got pissed off. Decided to hold some anyway. Given the over PC environment here, the local authority is turning a blind eye to the whole thing. Don't know what to do. Heh.
Anyway, some people did send me some links but I couldn't be asked to blog about it.
Sometimes gurus and similarly revered monks will be interred instead of cremated by their disciples, at least in the Gaudiya Vaishnav tradition.
This is how I want my remains disposed of:
I want my body fed to the lions at London Zoo like Daniel.
Hey,
I am hindu and from Karnataka- Everybody in my family is buried in our own farm and we have a nice tomb.
I think it's a caste thing...
Also I <3 Organ donors , mad props to Scotto
As said by the person above Lingayats in Karnataka are buried while they are in a seated position. As far as I know in Hindus Lingayats are the only ones to bury. Dont know about the reasons tho.
I recently read a book called Stiff by Mary Roach. It deals with the myraid uses of cadavers, e.g. automotive research for airbag impacts and crumpling bumpers and CSI research for decomposition of bodies (so investigators can more appropriately ascertain the time of death). It also asks a good question: how much respect does a body deserve after death? That is, is the body still your mother, father, brother, friend, etc? It's an interesting, and oddly funny, read. I'd recommend it for another perspective.
The custom is that sannyasins are buried, while householders are generally cremated. Which is why some protested when a "samadhi" was proposed for Mahatma Gandhi, who was cremated.
Re: cremation, a Harvard Professor's remarks come to mind (including more stuff than is necessary so I'm not guilty of misrepresenting the context).
"The Hindus in North America ( HINAs) are not just
hiina, "lost, abandoned", but they (understandably) cling to their
homeland in all manners they can come up with. "Reforming" our
schoolbooks according to an imagined Golden Age (Ram Raj), hoary India
is just one of the expressions we can observe.
They also tell their daughters to study Classical Indian dance (not
exactly a highly regarded occupation back home), they build many
temples and have Sunday schools (as many other ethnicities do). But,
they hardly invest in Higher Education as other successful Asians have
done. Nor allow their children to study items outside Law or Medicine,
such as Indian Studies, --- the only way that members of their group
could speak with real authority (for example, in school books).
However, as they are NRIs ("non returning Indians", as I just learned
from a Hindi movie), they have begun ---as an old, very conservative
US Brahmin friend pointed out to me already in 1994-- building
crematoria as well."