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A cache of ancient weapons from the Roman Empire era unearthed in Poland rekindles stories of the tribal cultures of the region.

These Georgetown University medical students used donated cadavers in their anatomy class in 2011. Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIn 1956, Alma Merrick Helms announced that she was bound for Stanford University. But she would not be attending classes. Upon learning that there was a “special shortage of women’s bodies” for medical students, this semiretired actress had filled out forms to donate her corpse to the medical college upon her death. As histo...

Long ago medical students had to rely on cadavers provided to them by grave robbers, but now some people are freely donating their bodies for the good of medical education and research.

Doctors need to cut open dead bodies to learn anatomy, but where do they get them?

For decades, medical schools faced a shortage of cadavers, prompting some students to rob graves so they had corpses to dissect. Many states later made the bodies of the unclaimed poor available for science, but the shortage finally broke for good in the late-1950s, when body donations became more popular.