you might think that leaving your body to science when you die is an altruistic gesture which will help medical students learn their trade and maybe even find cures for untreatable diseases. It certainly seemed so to my parents some 20 years ago, when they both wrote such a codicil into their wills.
My civil servant father, John Compton Miller, used to joke that he had undergone so many different operations during his lifetime that medical students would find his much scarred body and organs "quite fascinating." My mother Mary also felt that future patients should benefit in every way from her own surgical experiences. "When you die, your soul begins its journey and so what happens to your body afterwards doesn't really matter" was her attitude.
My sister and I hadn't really thought through their decision because we never wanted to contemplate them leaving us. But the moment that my father died in 1992 from pneumonia and heart failure things happened very quickly. As his next-of-kin, we were required by the Anatomy Donations Co-ordinator (sic) of Imperial College School of Medicine to complete two forms releasing his body to them. It was then whisked away from his Kensington hospice by special ambulance to the London Anatomy Office at Charing Cross Hospital. We were told that not only could his corneas perhaps be used to save someone else's sight, but other organs might prove suitable for transplants. It was the last contact that we would have with that office for nearly three years.
During that period we had plenty of time to imagine-and question-what was happening to our father. I had a frightful image of this dignified man being dissected like a laboratory rat. Did we really want our beloved father (and six years later, our mother) to be butchered by students?
I had heard ghoulish stories of how second-year students at leading teaching hospitals would "adopt" a corpse during their anatomy course and over a few months gradually dismember it in order to understand better how the human body worked. Each night it would be replaced in the hospital morgue a little lighter and more mutilated. A London medical student once told me how they were sometimes frisked on leaving the laboratory in case they had taken maybe a severed finger or toe, to examine in their digs.
What did the students know or care about these two elderly corpses as they tweaked their ribs, made incisions in their lung cavity and removed their livers for experiments? They were probably daydreaming about their exams, beating rival hospital teams at rugby, or seducing classmates.
How could they appreciate that my sensitive, civilised 92-year-old father had devoted his career to helping warring spouses try to mend their marriages in the High Court, wrote beautiful poetry and was a skilled amateur artist. And that my "wee mum," 13 years younger than him, had sacrificed a possible career as a concert pianist to become a full-time wife and mother.
My squeamishness about their decision was, temporarily at least, outweighed by the rational argument that I should respect their wishes. For what better means are there to train doctors in simple surgical procedures and perhaps find new treatments for cancer, heart disease and strokes than to practise on human beings? And certainly my father, as the son of a GP and brother of a homeopathic doctor in Hove, would have appreciated exactly how long and tortuous was their training.
Meanwhile, we shamefacedly had to explain to all the friends and relatives who wrote to us after reading our father's obituary in The Times and the Daily Telegraph that we were unable to hold a funeral service because we had no body to bury or cremate.
Then, almost three years later, came a letter from the London Anatomy Office. A functionary explained that there would be a communal cremation service for all those who had donated their bodies which we could attend. Otherwise we should come and pick up our father's ashes after the service.
We decided that collection was the preferable option. Alas, there was nothing very religious or uplifting about the cheap plastic urn and cardboard box in which his remains were placed. Much the same bathetic scenario happened when I recently retrieved my mother's ashes, except that the Anatomy Office only kept her body for 12 months.
However unsatisfactorily our parents' decision may have turned out, we had no choice but to respect their wishes. Perhaps some medical benefit has resulted from their gesture. They both led such valuable, unselfish lives that it is some comfort that in death they continued to help others. (And they seem to be increasingly unusual. A nurse in the London hospital where my mother died said that about ten people a day die in the hospital but in the 18 months since she had been there only four people had left their bodies to medical research.)
Would I donate my body to science? No. But I shall continue to carry my donor card so that my heart, kidneys, liver, corneas, and so on, can be used for transplantation. I want a swift cremation so that my friends and family do not have to endure the prolonged exit that we did. It was only this summer that we were finally able to scatter our parents' ashes in the places which had given them most joy during their lives. n
