Burke and Hare redux

[Gob]

A mother who campaigned for more than 40 years to find out what happened to her dead baby’s remains has found out his coffin was buried without a body inside.

Lydia Reid, 68, was given a court order for the exhumation of the grave of her son Gary, who died at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh in July 1975 aged seven days old. But no human remains were found.

The exhumation was performed by forensic anthropologist Prof Dame Sue Black, who found only a hat, a shawl, a cross and a name tag that had spelled Gary’s name incorrectly.

Reid, who played a leading role in the Scottish campaign to uncover the unlawful retention of dead children’s body parts for research, said the news was “devastating”.

She told the BBC: “We had the funeral, and on the day of the funeral I stated clearly there’s nothing in this coffin. The coffin was light. I know the weight of a baby.

“The coffin was light. My son was not there. And again, nobody believed me. Nobody believed me.

“I wanted to be wrong. I wanted to be called a stupid old woman,” said Reid. “But the minute Sue lifted the shawl out of the ground, I knew there was nothing in it. My heart hit my feet. I didn’t know what to say.

“They know what happened to my son. They know fine and well that they have that knowledge and they can give me peace. They can find my son. Even if he’s been incinerated – I want to know.

“Even if he’s lying in a jar in a hospital somewhere – I want to know. If it’s possible to get my son back, I want my son back. If it’s not, then at least tell me and let me have peace.”

The NHS in Scotland was forced to admit to having unlawfully retained about 6,000 organs and tissues in hospitals between 1970 and 2000, many of which belonged to children.

Reid has long suspected her son’s organs had been removed without permission but she has never found proof. She convinced Prof Black to carry out DNA tests on the remains, and was granted a court order for an exhumation.

Black told the BBC: “Ultimately there is only one possible logical explanation and that is that the body was not put in that coffin.

“There is no other answer because you never get that level of preservation of coffin and not have a body be preserved. There is no hair inside the hat, there is no bone inside the coffin shroud. It was not there and I have never seen that before.”

Scotmid Co-operative Funerals and NHS Lothian said Police Scotland had been informed. Police Scotland had no comment when contacted.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... pty-coffin

[Lord Jim]

the unlawful retention of dead children’s body parts for research...

...The NHS in Scotland was forced to admit to having unlawfully retained about 6,000 organs and tissues in hospitals between 1970 and 2000, many of which belonged to children.

Must be those evil Catholics again...

Oh wait...

This was done by scientists...


Has anybody been prosecuted?

[MajGenl.Meade]

[RayThom]

Unless the mother saw a lifeless dead infant I suspect it may not have died. Very possibly sold to a childless couple who were generous with their parish tithing. The church has been known to deal in baby trafficking which supposedly ended only around the '70s. Many babies "sperminated" by supposedly celibate priests were sold off in similar fashion.

I hope the mother finds closure but closure truly happens only when one dies.

[Burning Petard]

Scotland? Church? Huh?

snailgate

[ex-khobar Andy]

There was a scandal maybe 20 years ago about baby body parts being taken for research. Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool. In defense of the doctors who did this, I am sure that the motives were good (pediatric medical research) and the ethics of the day may have been to avoid distress to the parents by disclosing that tissue was retained for research purposes. Burke and Hare (for profit body snatchers) probably is not a great analogy. (Although they also operated in Edinburgh.)

[Lord Jim]

I am sure that the motives were good

The list of illegal, immoral, and unethical things that have been done with "good motives" is a very, very long one...

"good motives" are a frequently used rationalization for bad deeds...

I'm sure Josef Mengele believed he had "good motives"...

Certainly the nuns that rube is so fond of posting about who pressured young unwed mothers to give up their babies for adoption believed their motives were good, ditto the Australian officials who forcibly separated Aboriginal children from their parents...

In this case the primary problem looks to me to be, (as it so frequently is) hubris...

A belief on the part of those engaged in this vile practice that they were not bound by norms of legality, morality and ethics...

[BoSoxGal]

I will never understand the attachment to decomposing flesh from which the soul has departed.

[Lord Jim]

the ethics of the day may have been to avoid distress to the parents by disclosing that tissue was retained for research purposes.

I'm pretty sure that "the ethics of the day" was to not do this at all without the permission of the parents...

That's certainly what the law was...

But of course if you're going to do something illegal, immoral, and unethical, it's undoubtedly best not to inform your victims of your actions...

[ex-khobar Andy]

Actually the law of the day (The Human Tissue Act of 1961, which was very thoroughly revised in 2004 as a result of this and other scandals) was very vague. There was no specific requirement to obtain permission for removal of organs provided that the purpose of the removal and retention was for medical research.

Don't get me wrong: I think removal and retention of organs from a child's body without the express permission of the parent(s) is wrong even if the motive (disease prevention) is good. The Act was rightfully brought up to date. But it is pretty ridiculous to invoke Mengele as an example of someone with good motives.

[RayThom]

I will never understand the attachment to decomposing flesh from which the soul has departed.

BSG, I wholeheartedly agree. Once I'm dead, and deemed really, really dead by medical professionals, I don't care what happens to my body. Actually, I suppose I do -- my body is donated to the UofPenn Hospital for them to do as they please with it. Parts donation, post-mortem examination for diseased tissue and organs, and any manner of slice-and-dice practice for new surgeons, and then the remains dumped in the Dempsey. It doesn't matter.

That's why walking through graveyards at night never bothered me. Nothing is there other than future soil in an expensive box with a big stone label on top of it. If there was a ghost (soul) left behind that might be found by a ghost buster at the point and moment of death. In most cases that would be a hospital or crash scene -- definitely not where a casket is interred.

Quite honestly, out of all the friends and relatives that have died in my lifetime the only person I know where their remains can be found without checking cemetery records would be my father. "Pop in the Box" is in my brother's hall closet next to his hunting gear. Ol' dad hasn't changed in years.

Grieve as you wish, but when you die you die. Disposal doesn't have to be some archaic ritual that is relived forever.

[rubato]

The Catholic Church:

Sold hundreds of Irish babies to Americans.


Killed babies with neglect and buried them in mass graves in Irish convents.


Kidnapped and sold > 300,000 Spanish babies for huge amounts of money ( and lies to the mothers telling them that the children died)

AFAIK they have not used infant corpses for research without telling the parents. Maybe they were too busy?

Yrs,
Rubato

[Lord Jim]

LMAO

[rubato]

And the Dutch Catholic Church castrated a number of boys at least one of them in retaliation for reporting the abuse.


I do predictably point out the truth. I do. And you predictably change the subject.


Yrs,
Rubato

[Lord Jim]

No, what you are predictably doing Donald J. Rube, is using the typical Trumpian technique (which you employ on a regular basis) of trying to change the focus of the discussion to somebody else's completely unrelated misdeeds ( just like, "The Justice Department should be investigating Hillary's emails!") rather than deal with the topic at hand...

Which is the illegal, immoral, and unethical behavior systematically engaged in by scientists (a group who in your ultra-simplistic model of reality can do no wrong) in Scotland for at least a quarter century (from 1975-2000) detailed in the OP...

Upon that subject, you have nothing to say...

Which is probably just as well because if you did say anything about it, it almost certainly would not be to offer any sort of honest condemnation or criticism for the illegal, immoral, and unethical behavior of these scientists...

No, you'd just try to craft some sort of disingenuous defense or excuse for it, which really isn't even worth hearing...

ETA:

After I posted, I noticed you added this:

And you predictably change the subject.

I changed the subject?

[Scooter]

Sorry, you invited the comparison in your very first post. If he had introduced acts committed by religious persons/entities out of the blue, you would have a point, but you opened the door.

[BoSoxGal]

That's why walking through graveyards at night never bothered me. Nothing is there other than future soil in an expensive box with a big stone label on top of it.

If only it were just future soil; in reality, most corpses are embalmed and so over the years as they decompose, they leach toxic chemicals into the ground - not to mention the rotting casket materials and all the toxins applied to the grass, etc. to keep cemeteries looking lush.

And cremation also releases toxins into the environment, so that's not a great alternative.

I too am donating my shell to science, with a request that the bits leftover be disposed of in the most environmentally friendly way possible - burial at sea or planted in the ground in sackcloth, or if available, planted in the ground in one of these mushroom suits. Then please plant a tree over me!

Arsenic Contamination in Graveyards: How the Dead Are Hurting the Environment
Arsenic contamination in the ground and water around cemeteries is just one spark of the green burial movement.
June 2013
http://www.utne.com/environment/arsenic ... 0z1306zpit
Mark Harris

We call our cemeteries parks and lawns and fields and greens. Yet the American graveyard hardly qualifies as a natural environment. For all their landscaping aboveground, our cemeteries function less as verdant resting grounds of the dead than as landfills for the materials that infuse and encase them. The typical 10-acre swath of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 homes, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of embalming fluid sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the graveyard preternaturally green.

Like the contents of any landfill, the embalmed body’s toxic cache escapes its host and eventually leaches into the environment, tainting surrounding soil and groundwaters. Cemeteries bear the chemical legacy of their embalmed dead, and well after their graves have been closed. In older cemeteries, arsenic may be the longest-enduring contaminant. A highly toxic and powerful preservative, arsenic was a mainstay of early embalming solutions in the pre- and post-Civil War years. Druggists, surgeons and emerging chemical companies of the period mixed anywhere from a few ounces to many pounds of arsenic into the new preservative, but, as they’d soon discover, at great risk to the embalmers’ health. By 1910, so many embalmers had themselves perished from their efforts to preserve the dead with arsenic that the federal government stepped in and banned its use in embalming solutions.

Cemeteries that date back to the turn of the twentieth century may yet show traces of that long-banned preservative. Nearly a quarter of the water samples that John Konefes of the University of Northern Iowa drew from hand-pump wells on the grounds of some dozen Civil War-era cemeteries scattered around the state tested positive for arsenic, an element not common to Iowa groundwaters. Two samples contained arsenic at levels above the then-proposed drinking water standards. Konefes says his limited, 1990 research only suggests the potential for arsenic contamination of older cemeteries, but believes it’s strong enough to warrant further study. The toxic element “will not bio-remediate, it will not break down,” he says. “Exposed to water seeping through the grave, some of the arsenic in an embalmed body will leach out and it has to go somewhere.” Konefes’s work suggests that nearby groundwater, which may supply individual families or communities with their drinking water, is a logical place for arsenic to run.

No one has launched the large-scale study Konefes has proposed. In the mid-1990s, a geology professor and some of his students at New York’s Hamilton College did, however, conduct small-scale research into graveyard contamination. Testing groundwater down-gradient of a tiny, 1820s cemetery on college property, the group found trace amounts of arsenic and other lesser-used ingredients of early embalming compounds, such as zinc, lead and mercury. A sampling of groundwater above the cemetery showed no arsenic contamination. Those upper groundwaters flow beneath the cemetery in the direction of the lower groundwaters, so the appearance of arsenic in the latter suggests the toxic element came from the cemetery and its arsenic-embalmed bodies.

More recently two geologists at the University of Toledo detected arsenic not in groundwaters but in cemetery soil. Testing the soil of graves in a large, mid-1800s cemetery in northeast Ohio, Alison Spongberg and Paul Becks recorded “dramatic increases” in readings for arsenic in a number of samples taken from depths at which coffins lay and had eventually decayed. Lacking burial records, the researchers could not definitively trace the arsenic’s source to embalmed bodies interred there. But given that the samples were taken near graves dating back to the period of arsenic embalming, they “may indicate contamination from previous embalming practices and/or wood preservatives,” according to the study’s authors.

Spongberg and Beck also found their cemetery soil contaminated with a number of elements that are major components of another common burial product: the coffin. In soil samples taken at coffin depth, they detected elevated concentrations of copper, lead, zinc and iron, the very metals used in casket construction. Noting the high levels of both arsenic and coffin metals in their cemetery soils, the authors assert that their study warrants “concern for the quality of soil, groundwater, and nearby surficial water systems” in and around cemeteries. Archeologists take the potential of arsenic contamination seriously, for their own health’s sake. For fellow archeologists conducting digs within historic cemeteries, one contractor advises testing soils before starting in and, in those sites that boast high arsenic readings, consulting with HAZMAT experts to map out a strategy that ensures the safety of workers, from requiring the use of protective eyewear way to keeping down arsenic-laced dust.

Arsenic is less likely to taint the environs of the newer grave. In the decade before arsenic was banned from those first prep rooms, formaldehyde emerged as the embalmer’s preservative of choice and today is the prime ingredient of practically all embalming solutions on the market. Yet, like its more poisonous forbear, formaldehyde, too, leaves its mark on the environment.

Though safer for embalmers, formaldehyde is nonetheless a human carcinogen, and because of its potentially toxic effect when released into environment, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates it as a hazardous waste. The funeral industry, however, legally buries over three gallons of formaldehyde-based “formalin” embalming solution every time it inters an embalmed body. As the vast majority of casketed burials involve embalmed bodies, funeral directors oversee the burial of some three to five million gallons of formaldehyde into cemetery grounds every year.

Little research has focused on the potential environmental consequences of depositing such large volumes of a hazardous substance into cemetery grounds. Two, non-peer reviewed Canadian studies that examined the issue found traces of formaldehyde in groundwaters either beneath or down-gradient of seven cemeteries around Ontario. The amount of formaldehyde that turned up in the waters was small, both authors report, indicating as the 1992 study issued by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment states, “that cemeteries are not a significant contributing source of formaldehyde to groundwater” in that country. No one is systematically testing cemetery groundwaters for formaldehyde pollution in the United States, and the U.S. government has no established safety standards for the amount of formaldehyde in drinking water.

One side-effect of the funeral industry’s use of formaldehyde that has received more attention concerns the health of embalmers who handle it. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which classifies formaldehyde as a potential occupational carcinogen, strictly regulates its use among the funeral industry based on evidence that regular exposure to the toxic gas may harm its workers. Numerous studies have found that embalmers and funeral directors exhibit a higher incidence of leukemia and cancers of the brain and colon, as well as a severe and persistent skin condition known as “embalmer’s eczema,” all presumably caused by formaldehyde. Other agents in embalming compounds pose yet additional health risks. One study traced a noted loss of sex drive and breast enlargement among embalmers to estrogens in the massage creams they applied to the dead.

[rubato]

Turning my body into a toxic stew never appealed to me when it could form useful nutrients for the soil. Niel deGrasse Tyson has the same idea.

All of the heavier elements in our bodies were formed in stars, we are literal stardust, why choose to be a chemical waste dump for centuries whenwe could become part of the living fabric of earth instead?

Yrs,
Rubato

[RayThom]

[Lord Jim]

Sorry, you invited the comparison in your very first post. If he had introduced acts committed by religious persons/entities out of the blue, you would have a point, but you opened the door.

I didn't "open the door"...

I laid out the bait...

And he went for it like a hungry carp...