About this episode
This episode explores the dark history of body sourcing for medical education, focusing on grave robbing and the ethics surrounding it.
As haunting as the Harvard morgue scandal is, you don't have to go back very far in history to find practices for sourcing bodies that would be shocking today. Reporter Ally Jarmanning finds that for more than a century, medical schools relied on grave robbing and body snatching to supply anatomical dissection classes. In Episode 4 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard , she talks to medical school professors and historians about this grim reality, shedding light on how new the notion of ethics in this field is. And we hear from an FBI agent who's investigated the world of body brokers. If you have questions, comments or tips about this story, you can reach us at LastSeen@wbur.org .
People in this episode
Host: WBUR
Guest: Ally Jarmanning
Topics covered
- Harvard morgue scandal
- grave robbing
- body snatching
- anatomical dissection
- ethics in medicine
- body brokers
Keywords
- Harvard
- morgue scandal
- grave robbing
- body snatching
- anatomical dissection
- ethics
- body brokers
- FBI
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Harvard, FBI, Last Seen, WBUR
More episodes of Last Seen
- Postmortem, Update: The Sentences · December 23, 2025 · 34 min
- Introducing: What Remains from NHPR's Outside/In · January 29, 2025 · 37 min
- Postmortem, Ep. 5: A reckoning · May 1, 2024 · 29 min
- Postmortem, Ep. 3: The collectors · May 1, 2024 · 36 min
- Postmortem, Ep. 2: The victims · May 1, 2024 · 29 min
- Postmortem Ep. 1: The crime · May 1, 2024 · 26 min
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