There are many different ways of dealing with the prospect of death - a belief in karma, angels with harps, or a painless nothingness - but the thought that one's corpse might end up being picked over by medical students for educational purposes has never been a particularly comforting one.
Recent events have rendered it even less so: last September, the University of California at Irvine fired Christopher Brown, director of its medical school's "willed-body program", amid allegations that he had sold the spines of six donated bodies to a private research firm for $5,000 (£3,000). (He denies the accusations.) And a lawsuit filed in 1996 accused the authorities at the University of California at Los Angeles of having cremated 18,000 donated bodies alongside dead laboratory animals and dumping them in rubbish skips from 1950 to 1993.
But the unease is justified over here, too. In 1998, the artist Anthony Noel-Kelly was jailed for nine months for paying a trainee lab technician to steal body parts from a mortuary at London's Royal College of Surgeons to use as moulds for his sculptures. And urban folklore teems with macabre tales of limbs going missing from anatomy departments and turning up at drunken student parties.
You might have thought scare stories like these would have deterred potential donors from signing over their corpses, but nothing could be further from the truth: there's a nationwide surplus.
"If anything, we're declining offers rather than encountering a shortage," says Roger Searle, head of Newcastle University medical school's anatomical and clinical skills centre. "The citizens of the north-east are very generous, very public-spirited." The same seems true across Britain - many universities receive hundreds of approaches each year - even if generosity isn't necessarily the only motive: the University of California's website encourages potential donors with the hint that "some individuals leave their bodies to a [medical] school they always dreamed of attending".
The exploding popularity of body donation is all the more surprising considering the administrative palaver involved in actually assigning one's cadaver to an anatomy department. Write to the university of your choice and you'll first receive an extensive information pack detailing the legal documentation that must be completed for your decision to be officially valid. Then you'll need to persuade your next of kin of the merits of your decision, since, when you die, it will be they who have the ultimate power to decide what happens to your corpse. (If you have signed a donor card for organ transplants as well, this will normally take precedence if the circumstances are appropriate.) Finally, once you're gone, your immediate family will need to sign still more documentation allowing the university to arrange for you to be transported and refrigerated until your remains are required.
Even if you fill out all the right forms, though, the chances are that your corpse won't be accepted. "I'd say I send out up to 10 letters a week in response to requests for information, but probably I only accept around one in three bodies," says Roger Soames, deputy head of the school of biomedical sciences at Leeds University. Infectious diseases - HIV, say, or tuberculosis - will rule you out, because you may endanger staff and students. If you die of a cancer that has spread throughout your body, you will not display normal anatomical structures, and consequently won't be much use for general teaching. Obesity can be a problem, too, and if you die in suspicious circumstances, necessitating a postmortem examination, donation won't be possible. Even timing your death badly might pose difficulties: outside term time, universities may often be unable to collect and refrigerate you within the five-day time limit imposed by law.
However, says Soames, the popular belief that you need to die relatively young is incorrect: "We get a lot of enquiries asking 'Am I too old?', but the answer is no."
There is, of course, no opportunity for a conventional burial or cremation, so Searle encourages relatives to pay their last respects before a body is admitted to the university. Cremated ashes can eventually be returned to the next of kin, but it may be a long wait: the law entitles universities to retain bodies for up to three years, and they are often stored for a year before they're required. Instead, most medical schools - following Home Office recommendations - now hold regu lar collective memorial services attended by relatives of donors, medical students and faculty staff.
Strenuous efforts are being made to produce simulation technology that could render the use of real bodies in teaching obsolete, but it hasn't succeeded yet. "There are other methods, CD-roms and all that, but they just don't give you the same 3D image that you can touch and see that this runs here, that connects there," Searle says. "When former students come here as demonstrators in anatomy, there's a tremendous difference between those who did dissection at medical school and those who used plastic models."
Happily, there is little evidence to suggest that medical students will behave improperly with your cadaver, and the entire system is tightly regulated in the UK by Her Majesty's inspector of anatomy, operating under the provisions of the Anatomy Act of 1984 - the present-day successor to the law hastily introduced after Burke and Hare murdered at least 15 people in 19th-century Edinburgh in order to supply bodies for dissection to the anatomist Dr Robert Knox. (These days, no payments can be made.)
Much of the archetypal medical student's black humour is probably more reasonably seen as a coping mechanism for the somewhat grim task of dissection. And, for the record, there is no established source for the urban legend about the medical student who spends a year dissecting various parts of her assigned cadaver before, towards the end of her course, rolling back the cover to study the head - only to discover that the body is her uncle's.
