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[deleted] t1_ixqg088 wrote

"Museum of Missing Body Parts"?

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foodfightbystander t1_ixr37tc wrote

For those who didn't read the article:

  1. From 1915, they would harvest body parts of late British soldiers, which included Canadians at the time, for doctors to study and learn about war wounds. "Here's what the damage to a spleen from an artillery shell at 50 feet looks like", etc. It was part of a British program to help the doctors learn and treat such wounds.

  2. It was not made public (for obvious reasons) so when it did become public years later in the 1920s, there was an effort to return all the body parts to the appropriate places. In particular, they pulled 799 Canadian body parts out of the archive and returned them to Canada. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who was handling the operation, said it was to potentially create a museum.

  3. Once they got back to Canada, no one was really planning to build a museum, so they were sent to McGill University. McGill said "Well, as long as we have these items, we might as well use them as teaching tools for our medical classes" and did so until the 1960s. By that point, they were treated like any of the medical donations that had outlived their usefulness and they were properly destroyed.

Not really the scandal that it's appearing to be. During WWI, soldiers were considered to serve even past death, meaning if the war effort could use their bodies, it was considered acceptable to do so. Using those bodies to educate doctors how to save lives seems pretty much what most people would want their remains used for.

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Lord_Space_Lizard t1_ixrajxn wrote

Replying to foodfightbystander (#669,915)

> During WWI, soldiers were considered to serve even past death,

And that is how we ended up with the Universal Soldier and RoboCop programs. I'm glad in WW1 we didn't have the reanimation technological advances that lead to those disasters.

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Razwog t1_ixsbal8 wrote

McGill University actually has a small but awesome anatomy museum in the Strathcona building, basically has organs and interesting medical specimens preserved in formaldehyde. Worth checking out.

Source: I'm a McGill Alumnus. Once I even took several wrong turns on the way to the bathroom in the Strathcona building and ended up walking into a dissection!

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