VALUE OF A HUMAN BODY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 55, 5 November 1913, Page 4

VALUE OF A HUMAN BODY.

A German analyst, in his zeal to magnify his office, has worked out an elaborate estimate of the commercial worth of the human body when that wondrous organism is reduced to its constituent elements by the chemist and put on the market. The figuresi as given by the “Medical Press and] Circular,” show that a 1501 b. human being is worth €1 11s 3d. “His fat is worth 10s od : of the iron there is hardly enough to make a nail an inch long. There is sufficient lime to whitewash a pretty good-sized chicken house. The phosphorus would be sufficient to put heads on 2200 matches, and there is enough magnesium to make a pretty firework. The average human body contains enough albumen for 100 eggs. There arc possibly a teaspoonful of sugar and a pinch of salt. At first sight, says tin- medical organ, we seem to have found a Useful outlet for our surplus population. To turn the tin-.employable-into whitewash and get the unemployed to apply it to nur'chicken houses sounds simple, but it i«s not. For the elements are so mixed in ns that, when Nature sots them up and says this is a man, it would cost more than £1 11s bd to turn our substance to any baser uses. It is had luck that when we have done with our bodies we cannot hand them over to the hardware dealer, hut it is our fate. Oust we are, and we remain the qnintcsS l once of dust.