Thursday, December 22, 2005
What you don't know won't hurt you
The family of Alistair Cooke, the late veteran BBC broadcaster, expressed horror today at reports in New York that his bones may have been stolen by a criminal gang trading in body parts.
Allegedly, Cooke's bones were stolen and sold for transplants before he was cremated, raising the question, were Cooke's "cremains" actually Cooke? The family, having scattered Cooke's ashes in New York's Central Park, is outraged that they may have scattered the wrong person's ashes.
Being a moral cretin, I have three disparate reactions to this story, none of which reflect well on me.
First, why would anybody want the bones of somebody who was 95 years old when he died? Isn't the real victim here the unknown patient who received implants made from Cooke's undoubtedly osteoperotic femur?
Second, isn't the scattering of cremains entirely symbolic? That is, once you've decided to burn a human body into a couple of pounds of ash, does it really matter whether the ash itself is pure, or complete? Haven't you already adopted the Klingon theory, that the body is an empty shell? Isn't the scattering of the ashes a symbolic act, like eating a communion wafer? (Or at least like a Protestant eating a communion wafer -- this is not a post about transubstantiation.)
Third, I've always believed that we should have a free, regulated market in body parts. If people knew that their heirs would profit from the sale of their still-usable components, not only would we have a much greater supply of transplantable tissue (and more lives saved or improved as a result), but there would be no real incentive to steal it.
Told you I was a moral cretin.
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