BODY BEQUESTS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4777, 17 November 1924, Page 1

BODY BEQUESTS.

HELPING MEDICAL RESEARCH.

GRIM RELICS FOR SCIENCE. Dr. Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, the Armenian language authority, who has left a will bequeathing his body to “the nearest medical school for the use of .the students of anatomy,” follows a long line of posthumous benefactors of medical science who have made similar bequests at various times. incurable —or .uncured —ailments have sometimes dictated the bequest; sometimeis, top, suicide. Only a short time ago Mr T. Birkett Barker, a Warwickshire county councillor and magistrate, died and directed “that my body be sent to the General Hospital, Birmingham, and rcst-mortem thereof be made to ascertain if any information can be obtained for the benefit ofi posterity as to the origin, mitigation, or cure of .the scourge of headache, the unmerciful disaster that has wrecked my happiness from my earliest recollection.’’ An official in a London medical school informed “The Observer” that suffererjs from ailments frequently make similar offers, which are seldom accepted, because post-mortem examination. has usually in the past failed to disclose anything .abnormal, Recently a Clapham working man, suffering from a malignant growth which doctors had deemed incurable, and convinced that he had not long to live, offered to sell; his body to the Epsom Guardians at death; he was out ol work at the time. Authorities, however, are shy of offers of the kind, for they can never be pure that the contract will be fulfilled. The law holds that one’s body ceases to be one’s personal property at death, aaid any relative is entitled to have it decently buried, codicil or no codicil io the contrary. At present Boards of Guardians can, if they choose, dispose of the body of a pauper who dies without friends or relatives in the interests of medical science. But the matter has frequeiitiy been one of delicate debate and indelicate protest. King’s College anatomical, department has had only one case in the course of,several years, and University College one in over twenty years—that of a man who hanged himself in Epping Forest, with the request that his unfortunate remains should be placed at the service ofi medical science. Two years ago- a woman suicide wrote: “My body can go to St. /Mary’s Hospital,” but the husband appealed and pie bequest wap decJared invalid. Professor G. Elliott Smith, the eminent craniologist at University College, recently confessed to an "Observer” representative ■ that he had been bequeathed, for research purposes! under a will the brains of certain eminent'men. He was forbidden to divulge names —at least for the present—and kept the brains under his special and secret care.

Among prominent men who have bequeathed their bodies or brairds to medical science were Archdeacon Horsley, who died in the East, Dr. Monsey, the intimate friend of David Garrick, who ordered that his body should be thrown in the Thames (it was buried at Chelsea). Dr. Thomas Robson Ellerby, a London Quaker, who held it was incumbent upon everyone in his profession to “agree beforehand that his body should be the property of his sorrowing brethren ” and Sir Astley Cooper, who himself made good une of “resurrection men.”

Perhaps the most remarkable of all was Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and economist, who wrote a small work, “Auto-icon; or the Uses of the Dead to the Living,” advocating a modern form of mummyism. A man, he urged, might, be embalmed and preserved as his own statue; a country gentleman mignt have “autoicons’’ bf his family alternating with the ancestral trees bordering the path to his dwelling—“copal varnish would protect the face from the effects of rain, and caoutchouc the habilmenta." At Bentham’s wish his body was made the subject of an anatomical lecture, and his skeleton clothed and seated in a chair, surmounted by a wax head moulded by a distinguished French artist, in that condition—with the actual head reposing in a case at his feet—he is preserved at University College to this day.