Cut Up and Leased Out, the Bodies of the Poor Suffer a Final Indignity in Texas

September 17, 2024

A person sitting on a box next to a building

(NBC News) – The University of North Texas Health Science Center built a flourishing business using hundreds of unclaimed corpses. It suspended the program after NBC News exposed failures to treat the dead and their families with respect.

A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.

In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found. (Read More)