Med School Owes Its Existence To Many Bodies of Knowledge

You'd think selling bodies would be ancient history. But despite long-running programs allowing people to donate their organs and bodies after death for medical science, this year a black market of body parts made headlines nationally and internationally. In a case in California, for example, hundreds of bodies were illegally carved up.

With growing demand for tissue and bone, some corpses were disappearing, with organs and other body parts sold to medical research facilities, tissue banks and the like.

And every now and then, there's an odd little incident.

Such as last month, when a doctor called police in Michigan because he saw a mummy posted on eBay. There was even a bid on it, $500 from "Satan's Child." (The online auction site removed the posting because it doesn't allow the sale of human bodies or body parts, according to a spokeswoman, with exceptions for skulls or skeletons for medical purposes.)

Definitely one of the weirder calls he's ever gotten, said Port Huron police Capt. Don Porrett. The Port Huron woman who tried to sell the mummy, Lynn Sterling, told police she was doing so for a friend who found it while tearing down a school building in Detroit.

"He claimed he'd had it 30 years," Porrett said. "Where do you keep a mummy? Does that go back with the Christmas decorations, up in the attic?"

The medical examiner's office contacted a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University. Norm Sauer said he'd never seen anything like it. It was the body of a 7- to 9-year-old child, dissected with the organs removed and preserved with salt and sugar.

His graduate assistant, Kristin Horner, had by strange coincidence once seen the Burns collection and immediately recognized it as one of the 200-year-old Scottish cadavers.

So they're sending it back to Maryland -- once all the paperwork is taken care of, to make it legal. One more dead body, just in time for the bicentennial.