About this episode
Ally Jarmanning explores the ethics of body-parts collecting in museums and compares it to recent controversies at Harvard.
In Episode 5 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard , reporter Ally Jarmanning digs deeper into the "legitimate" realm of body-parts collecting — museums — and asks the burning question: How different is this from the world of Jeremy Pauley in his basement or Cedric Lodge seizing a financial opportunity at Harvard's morgue. At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, she takes us through displays of skeletons and sometimes-troubling human specimens. What comes up here and at museums around the country — did the people who used to belong to these bodies ever imagine themselves in a jar, or on a shelf? Did they give permission for decades of gawking? After all this reporting, Jarmanning examines the ethics of it all, probing how we should treat the dead, and who gets to decide. And she returns us to Harvard, where hardly anyone, except Lodge, has been held to account. If you have questions, comments or tips about this story, you can reach us at LastSeen@wbur.org .
People in this episode
Host: Ally Jarmanning
Topics covered
- body-parts collecting
- ethics of death
- museums
- human specimens
- accountability
Keywords
- body parts
- Harvard
- Mütter Museum
- ethics
- human specimens
- accountability
- death
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Harvard, Mütter Museum
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- Postmortem, Ep. 4: The anatomy lab · May 1, 2024 · 24 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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