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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people?

> The reasons are largely practical ones. Most medical school tables are not large enough to accommodate a human being larger than 200 lbs or longer than 6' tall. > Donated bodies also have to be moved by students and/or researchers, and heavier bodies are harder to move, posing injury risk.

These also seem like bad reasons. Why not dismember the body? Why not use them for crash tests or other cadaver-driven science?

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> Why not dismember the body? Why not use them for crash tests or other cadaver-driven science?

Oh HN.

Medical schools aren't just some kind of cadaver multiplexer, farming them out to other industries that want one for "crash tests". If you want your body to be used for "crash tests", say so, and then hope your body meets the requirements of that industry.

Shockingly, that has recently been found to be true in some cases.

“Arizona man finds out mother’s body donated to science was sold to be used in IED blast test”

https://www.newsweek.com/donated-body-sold-army-brc-arizona-...

"Dismembered limbs sewn together like 'Frankenstein' at body-parts donation center, FBI found"

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dismembered-body-parts-...

Here's a comprehensive overview of the problem from Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-body...

This is now my dying wish.

Cue Adam Savage saying "for science!" But I dunno, it could save some soldiers' lives. It's only outrageous until you think it through.

>Jim Stauffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother’s body. He also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic-safety and other non-medical experiments.

That's where it crosses the line between unfortunate and immoral.

This wasn't a medical school.

You might not be aware, but lots of people who donate their bodies for science don't have their bodies end up as cadavers for dissection or even traditional medical research.

Donation for science is a broad category which includes everything from crash tests to bombs.

Source: I have a friend who runs crash tests,*, but I'll give you a link I Googled anyway.

https://www.bodyshopbusiness.com/strange-but-true-donated-bo...

*Fun but morbid fact: they have a lot of trouble procuring dead babies.

Saw a random tiktok the other day that a donated body was used in some kind of aerial crash test, much to the surprise and dismay of the family.

>*Fun but morbid fact: they have a lot of trouble procuring dead babies.

Oh well.. that's good... kinda.

> This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people?

It makes a lot of sense, operating on obese patients is a lot more complicated than on regular patients, and so would dissecting one.

That's like reading an article about how learning to weld has become complicated in florida because the state's underwater, and your reply being "This makes no sense, if you're under water doesn't it make sense to learn underwater welding?"

But underwater welding adds a ton of complexity to what you're trying to learn. You don't try to do that when trying to learn the basics and are probably already overwhelmed. In the same way you don't learn a new programming language by switching your editor to windings and RTL.

Sounds like there’s a business opportunity here to make larger medical school tables with wheels to easily move patients

Actually, if I remember correctly; Covid already made that a thing in some ways. Back during the pandemic, they had to figure out some way to turn over patients that were infected and too big to move easily; so a specialized gurney was created. (I think they are called gurney's but am not 100% sure.)

Note that the article predates Covid by 3 years.

Fair enough, thanks for pointing that out.

I will compete with your BIGTABLE.COM company by creating EZCORPSESPLITTER.COM

It’s like microservices vs a monolith but the server is a corpse

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