The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [139]
We learned of two burial committees connected with Friends Meetings, one in Ohio, the other in Burnsville, North Carolina. When a member dies, the committee supplies a plain plywood box, places the body in it, and delivers it by station wagon to the crematory or medical school. The next of kin pays for the cost of the lumber in the box plus crematory charges and obituary notices. There is no charge for the committee’s services, which include making the box. The total expense is generally under $250. The committee arranges for “help with the children or with food, a lift with the housework, hospitality for visiting relatives—a rallying of friends in a quiet coordinated way.” A memorial service is generally held three or four days after death.
In the wake of the Post article, several other publications took up the subject of disposal of the dead, evoking in each instance spirited response from the funeral industry. The Reader’s Digest of August 1961 ran an article, “Let the Dead Teach the Living,” which pointed to a critical shortage of cadavers for anatomical study in medical schools. Said the Reader’s Digest, “Every individual who bequeaths his remains to a medical school makes an important contribution to the advance of human knowledge.”
Medical Economics, a national physicians’ journal, carried a piece describing the participation of doctors in the funeral society movement. A Kentucky pediatrician is quoted as saying, “We should encourage people to use educational, health, or welfare funds as a memorial to the dead rather than throw a lot of money into a barbaric funeral ceremony complete with gussied-up bodies, expensive caskets, parades, and regalia.” Said Mr. Howard C. Raether in a speech delivered to the NFDA convention: “The ultimate of all these programs is to give the entire body to medical science. With no body there is no funeral. If there are no funerals, there are no funeral directors. A word to the wise should be sufficient.” Said the National Funeral Service Journal, “This is a practice that cannot openly be opposed without branding the funeral directors as being indifferent to the health and welfare of mankind.… The loss of a casket sale will create a financial blow in those cases where the body is contributed to a medical school. Fortunately, such cases are infrequent at the present time; unfortunately, they may become more frequent in the future.”
After Words
Now again the funeral folk are gazing hopefully into a clouded crystal ball. By 1996 more bodies, not fewer, were being donated for medical research, leading those in the trade once more to spread untruths. Thomas Lynch, a Michigan undertaker, wrote in The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton, 1997): “The supply of cadavers for medical and dental schools in this land of plenty [has been] shamefully but abundantly provided for by the homeless and helpless, who were, for the most part, more ‘fit’ than Russ.” Russ—after being discouraged from body donation—fit quite nicely in one of Mr. Lynch’s caskets, the author was pleased to report. A quick check with the three medical schools in Michigan indicated that Wayne State and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have an “urgent need” for body donors; Michigan State University has a moderate need: “We can always use people.”
Once the FTC Funeral Rule was passed in 1984, publicity and protest quieted down. Cremation was more readily obtained, and prices were available over the phone. The spirit of social activism that spurred the memorial societies lost its steam, and membership began to dwindle. In some areas, societies died out altogether. In other areas—where a favorable price had been negotiated with cooperating mortuaries—they flourished quietly.