Insider trading : how mortuaries, medicine and money have built a global market in human cadaver parts / Naomi Pfeffer.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Skin donors-on-the-hoof -- Pioneers of "eye banking" -- "Doctor, I see you!" : marketing corpse philanthropy -- Bioprospecting in mortuaries -- The doctrinal tyranny of skin -- Growth hormone soup -- The American market for a growth-promoting substance -- Civilian burns : prevention and treatment -- Extending shelf life after death -- Cadaver eyes, death denial and the National Health Service -- Whose corpse is it? -- Collecting British cadaver pituitary glands -- Lionizing American eye banks -- A gland lost is a gland wasted -- Who's in the mortuary? -- Representational dilemmas in marketing eye pledges -- Banking british cadaver skin -- The burn-prone society -- Harvesting the dead -- Horse-trading in the mortuary -- Value for money in American mortuaries -- Financing high-value eye banks -- Regulation is necessary, but how? -- The Blind Eye Act -- Creating American hybrid extractors of cadaver stuff -- Sharing pledges and cadaver stuff -- Iatrogenesis : Disregarding risk in plain sight -- Ask, or don't ask : inconsistencies in collecting sites -- Climbing up the value chain -- Contagious corpses -- British prions -- Compassion and commerce -- A roadmap for the future -- Repairing the past -- Globalizing the gift -- Consolidation without cooperation -- From mortuary to shopping cart?

The cadaver industry in Britain and the United States, its processes and profits: Except for organ transplantation little is known about the variety of stuff extracted from corpses and repurposed for medicine. A single body might be disassembled to provide hundreds of products for the millions of medical treatments performed each year. Cadaver skin can be used in wound dressings, corneas used to restore sight. Parts may even be used for aesthetic enhancement, such as liquefied skin injections to smooth wrinkles. This book is a history of the nameless corpses from which cadaver stuff is extracted and the entities involved in removing, processing, and distributing it. Pfeffer goes behind the mortuary door to reveal the technical, imaginative, and sometimes underhanded practices that have facilitated the global industry of transforming human fragments into branded convenience products. The dead have no need of cash, but money changes hands at every link of the supply chain. This book refocuses attention away from individual altruism and onto professional and corporate ethics. --Publisher's website.

Print version record.

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