Several companies are doing very well indeed by marketing products created from dead human flesh.
This real-world Gothic has several classic horror aspects. Body horror, of course:
Human skin takes on the color of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about six square feet...
“At the basic level what we are doing to the body, it’s a very physical — and I imagine some would say a very grotesque — thing,” said Chris Truitt, a former RTI employee in Wisconsin. “We are pulling out arm bones. We are pulling out leg bones. We are cutting the chest open to pull the heart out to get at the valves. We are pulling veins out from the inside of skin.”
Consider, too, the mystery surrounding the trade:
[T]he tissue-donation system can deepen the pain of grieving families, keeping them in the dark or misleading them about what will happen to the bodies of their loved ones...
[S]ome patients don’t even know that they are the final destination. Doctors don’t always tell them that the products used in their breast reconstructions, penis implants and other procedures were reclaimed from the recently departed.
Then there's this good old Gothic trope, the corpse stealer:
Ground-level body wranglers [great phrase] in the U.S. can get as much as $10,000 for each corpse they secure through their contacts at hospitals, mortuaries and morgues. Funeral homes can act as middlemen to identify potential donors. Public hospitals can get paid for the use of tissue-recovery rooms.
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(thanks to Jesse Walker and Steven Kaye)
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