My dad was the Director Of Manufacturing for Clay Adams in the 70s. We've had a skull in our home for over 50 years. I'm actually just about to sell it to an osteopathic physician who will use it as a teaching tool for his students, its original intention. Many of the bodies they processed were indeed from India, it was not uncommon for families to sell the bodies for research rather than pay for burial space. Trust me when I say he brought weirder things home from work.
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While my family was living at Stanford married student housing we found an almost complete skeleton, minus the skull, at the "free store"--an area on campus where people dropped off useful but unwanted items.
Ridiculous. I have a human skull I got years ago while teaching art anatomy in New York. To art professionals like myself, a skull is a tool, an artifact, a prop. No need to be queasy about it. No need to romanticize it. It is what it is, an object.
They're expensive. I bought mine from a homeless man selling collected garbage items on Sixth Avenue for $5, a bargain. And its in relatively good shape except for the missing lower jaw. I display it on my bookshelves at home. No problem.
No, I never asked. I just wanted a real skull to work with.
http://www.from-the-doghouse.com/Wolfville-DgH/Restoration-3/FamRm-l_423...
Top shelf, extreme right – need to look hard to see it.
I also have a monkey and a goat.
http://www.from-the-doghouse.com/Wolfville-DgH/SALON/Mother_5315.jpg
http://www.from-the-doghouse.com/Wolfville-DgH/Restoration-3/PersianCarp...
A skull is a skull.
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
~ Shakespeare: Hamlet: Act 5, Scene 1
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Your note about the old Playboy magazines brought back a favourite story: my buddy was asked to sell a huge collection of adult magazines that belonged to his friend's deceased father. The friend said, "Some are probably valuable. I started to go through them, but then I saw that he had cut out some of the mail away ads for swingers... I had to stop there before I found out any more." Talk about skeletons!
And, no, they weren't worth much (not surprising, given the state of nakedness available online).
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I once went to an old and very learned Rabbi seeking advice about my grandfather's gravesite in London which had fallen into disrepair. He told me to make the minimum changes necessary to keep it intact because the place was holy. Skeletal remains ought to be buried in the ground somewhere, preferably under a nice tree.
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I would encourage you to get rid of the old magazines. There is certainly no need to pay for a storage unit to house them and expect your children to deal with them. The price of storing them alone cancels out any money you might make on a future sale. Just toss the old socks and all the rest of it. You will feel better.
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“retribution is mine sayeth the surviving spouse.” I suppose that makes her the winner?
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I'm a paleopathologist and the trade in human bones is an ethical concern in my field. As the author says the laws concerning the sale of human skeletons is sparse. Even NAGPRA which does protect Native American remains and is relatively expansive was only enacted in 1990. Additionally, bones are regularly transported accross borders under which circumstance it becomes difficult to prosecute. The laws concerning medical specimens and archaeological remains are also different and of course vary from country to country. (The EBay sale of human remains often included Native American remains and was quite difficult to shut down.)
I am very relieved that the author did not choose to display the skull though. I would remind the doctors on this thread of their ethics courses. Respect for remains is integral particularly once they have entered the research or study domain. This is partially because you yourself need to have a good reputation should you wish to gain IRB approval for future studies and because these were once people. Some of them donated their bodies and some of them did not. Even if you yourself are comfortable with your remains being handled and displayed that is not true for everyone. Not everyone wants to see human remains and not everyone would consent to having their remains seen, handled, or displayed. This is why for research you have to get informed consent. This also prevents abuses.
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This skull was sold and used as an educational product, and was, in fact, marked with the brand name of Clay Adams, a large and diverse medical supply company which is now a part of Becton-Dickenson.
While my Great Kreskin turban is in the shop, it is not possible for me to divine the intentions of the dead, but it is reasonable to presume that the donor of an artifact marked, marketed and sold by a major corporation for the purpose of education would not object to its being displayed where others might see it and learn from it.
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Did you read the entire article? The skull was likely from a young child from India from the 1970s, and was therefore from a family where either they were too poor to bury or cremate their child, or that the corpse was dug up by grave robbers. In the first case, the family certainly would have been under considerable duress, and in the second case, the family most certainly did not consent at all. And in any case, the donor involved, being a child, who could not in any case consent at all, making it even thornier.
I personally would find it abhorrent to think that I might have some grieving family's child's skull displayed as a curiosity when they were either desperate for survival and taken advantage of, or had it stolen unknowingly. I have worked extensively with cadavers in my medical training but we always had the utmost respect for those who CHOSE to donate their bodies- and I say chose because we had the utmost safeguards ensuring this. We understood this was a high honor with which we were entrusted and acted thusly. We met the families at the end of our anatomy class (in aggregate) and had a memorial service and thanked them for allowing their loved ones to help us to preserve life . I can't imagine how appalling it would be if I had found out I had been doing what I had done on someone who had NOT consented, it would give me nightmares still. Never mind even though I would be doing it for learning, imagine someone just displaying it.... ugh, where is our humanity?
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We don't know where the skull came from, or what age, nationality, or economic circumstances pertained to its original owner.
The author wrote that some guy on the internet who buys and sells bones told her that. If you want to honor a skull and bury it, like we all did with specifically donated cadaver parts in medical school (which was essentially a political gesture, always covered in the local newspaper, to maintain the flow of donations from the community), then by all means do. If your theology demands it, then that's fine, too.
Personally, my experiences in life and in medicine leave me with no shred of a belief in a god or a hereafter, so there is no way that any spirit remaining from the skull could be aggrieved, and, since the company that supplied it was absorbed into a larger corporation in 1964, if we postulate your theories about its origin, not only the parents, but also any siblings of this individual are likely no longer around to be concerned about it.
It is a calcified artifact of a person who was once alive. Nothing more and nothing less. It is more than is likely to remain of any of us decades after we have died. Do you feel the same way about other body parts that are preserved apart from the other remains of their now-deceased owners? Should the pathology services of hospitals hold ceremonies when they dispose of all of the excised appendices that they keep after every appendectomy, and that they will not return to their owners?
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A great essay. Ultimately, it is difficult to deal with the unexpected especially when it is macabre.
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Oh for goodness sake, does everything have to be a huge dramatic scene?
It's just a skull. A naturally occurring part of a body, which its original owner clearly no longer needs.
Why not display it with your other curios? We have a number of animal skulls in our collection, and would be happy to display a human skull as well, should we come across one.
When I was in college, and old friend of mine "came across" a complete human skeleton hanging outdoors on his campus, which has apparently been "liberated" from a lab for Halloween. I was its custodian for a few years, and, yes, I kept it hung from a cup hook just inside my closet door in my dorm room: open closet, come face to face with skeleton. Creeped my roommate out for some reason I could never understand, but then he became a lawyer, while I became a doctor...
Find a skull? Keep it and put it somewhere cool, or give it to your kids (they may think it's great), or sell it on line and make a couple of grand.
This seems to me to be an article about a non-problem.
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Did you read the piece? She DELL sell it, and donated the proceeds to charity in a particularly creative fashion.
And gave us an amusing anecdote to brighten an otherwise dreary morning while doing so.
No need for the snark...
I had a real human skull once as well. I’m doctor by profession. They are rare, because the models can never have the real tracks of foramina from which the nerves of the brain exit through. The learning from a real skull is immense as opposed to the plastic ones. It allows appreciation of the structures of the various “holes” and how they connect internally to the brain. My academic interest was neither surgical (of which dentistry would come under) nor in neurology. I felt that it would be a waste to keep it with me although it was so precious as they are hard to procure. One season, a young neurologist took me under his wing. I was thankful for his mentorship. I decided to gift him the skull where he would more likely use it to inspire and teach others.
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Human heads are routinely transported on planes and into hotels for medical conferences for dissection and to learn new surgical techniques.
Exactly what is the big deal about having a human skull in your house ?
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Respect for human body even after life was the first thing I learned when I was in Dental School in the 80s. My university had a “library” of bones that the students could borrow and take home to study. I didn’t know who the donors were and their life stories but I will be forever indebted to them!
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I find this (question of remains and how we treat them when exposed to them, etc.) a serious and interesting topic for reflection and appreciate your perspective here Beatriz, especially as it comes from outside of my social experience. I wonder at how we react as we do to the evidential refuse of our existence, at how that reaction differs amongst individuals and how those reactions differ when confronted by non-human refuse. I have no real thing to say here other than thinking out loud and to say thank you.
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interesting story. I have a skull passed down to me thru my grandfather who went to Harvard for dental school, serves as a dentist in WW1. Seems funny now, but dentistry and oral health were cutting edge health care in 1916. Dental health, even today, is a marker for economic status.... Grampa would have been horrified.
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Wow, what an epiphany! Of course you shouldn't keep a human skull in your closet, and you want a pat on the back for realizing that?
Shameful, deal with it properly and hope you're not dealt with in the same manner.
Interesting. Didn't know this situation was so common. I too received a human skull left behind on the death of my father who had acquired it upon the death of his father, a dentist in the 1920's and 30's. I gave it to a scientist colleague who collected skulls from all sorts of vertebrates.
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Thank you for sharing. Beautifully written. I would try contacting the National Museum of Dentistry in Maryland. They might have an idea for those skulls!
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Oh wow. I’m in a very similar situation. My father was a dentist, and the skull he bought in school is still in my mom’s house. We’re not quite sure what to do with it. A few years ago I loved cross country and considered bringing it with me, but it seems like there are laws against transporting human remains across state lines. And, how would I explain this to an airline?
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My husband's father was a dentist, and when he died, we also were faced with the question of what to do with a teaching skull.
Luckily for us, our local newspaper ran an article about what to do with "found skulls"--take them to the local medical examiner's office, along with any documentation that might accompany them.
So I took ours in, and was told that the skull would continue to be used as a teaching tool. I don't know whether such laws are national or local, but at least in our state, it was a illegal to to possess them.
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What a terrific piece that so beautifully comes full-circle at the end. Robin Eileen Bernstein is such a talented reported-essay writer, and I hope to read more of her work here.
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I loved this essay, from the very beginning to the last perfect line. And I was reminded of my brother’s skull, when he still lived at home and was in his first year of dental school at NYU. I don’t know what ever became of it. Maybe my mother donated it somewhere when she sold our house in Brooklyn. Thanks, Robin, for this delightful essay.
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I would have sent the skull to the Mutter Museum. If they didn't have a place for it, they'd find it a good home.
Enjoyed your column so much. Is this what's called a hybrid essay--part personal essay and part factual report? The kind of piece Ian Frasier does so often in The New Yorker? I'm thinking of giving up fiction for it. I'm looking forward to your memoir.
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I had tears in my eyes after reading this essay. Wow. First of all, Ms. Bernstein, never stop writing, please--readers(like me) need you. I can't remember any recent story I've read that has resonated so much with me.
That skull--yikes. It brought to my mind the "skull" I inherited from my uncle (via my deceased mother). It's attached to a keychain--one of those plastic joke items, obviously not real. However, it does have a movable jaw--and it's always scared the heck out of me for some reason. I don't even like to handle it and have it packed away with other "mementos." I've held on to it, mainly because it falls into a gray area of "family heirloom." Silly, but at least it's not real!
I don't read many memoirs. Most of them bore me, to be honest. However, I'm sure I'll read Ms. Bernstein's book when it comes out--I'm fascinated already!
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Wow! What an amazing discovery about the provenance of these bones. Great story.
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You're onto something re India. Did you see this from NPR? http://wnpr.org/post/classroom-skeleton-whose-bones-are-these .
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