While here in the UK medical universities are in desperate need of more body donors, a ferry or plane ride across the Channel it’s a whole different story.
The Netherlands has seen a large rise in the last few years in the amount of body donors, with the Academic Centre in Amsterdam seeing triple the amount of donors since 2000 and the Leiden University’s Medical Centre getting double since the 90s.
Academic hospitals have even started to refuse bodies because of the paperwork involved and the expense of arranging a funeral. The increase is thought to have been caused because less people think of the so-called “third-way” (other than burial and cremation) as taboo. Publicity around Hendrikje van Andel‘s case, who died in 2005 at the age of 115 and thought to be the oldest person in the world at the time, helped tackle some of the negative associations to do with body donations. Her body was given to the Academic Hospital at Groningen.
In 2006 the amount of body donors was roughly 1,000, while the yearly necessity of donors in the Netherlands is said to be half as much.
Mhh, I wonder if the Dutch are willing to set up a body exchange?
UPDATE: Pat mentions that with the decline in religiosity more people become willing to donate their body, which is of course a fair point. But in this case both Britain and the Netherlands are pretty secular societies where religion has come to play a less prominent role. Media reporting is the crucial difference. In the Netherlands there were positive stories about Hendrikje van Andel. The UK on the other hand has been dogged by controversies like the one at the Alder Hey Hospital, where more than 2,000 pots containing body parts from around 850 infants were found to have been held without consent and the one surrounding Channel 4‘s infamous Anatomy for Beginners where the first public autopsy since 1830 was performed on television. Rightly or wrongly, the media has come to play a critical role in how people feel about this issue.
4 Comments
They could possibly make a lot of money out of body exchange. But it’ll probably also mean more paperwork.
The rise in humanism and a decline in religiousity is another reason for the increase in body donations across the board, naturally most cultures and religions have very strict ideas around the disposal and usage of dead bodies, and perhaps with people wanting to do their part for science and rejection of hard and fast rules around what happens to the body post death.
Always an interesting topic, and having to reject bodies is a pretty good situation for any sort of body donation body (?) to be in.
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