From grave robbing to giving your own body to science ȁ

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 historians of medicine, we had

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