It’s a ghoulish fact that early medical research had to be conducted on stolen corpses. The problem in those days was a heightened sense of privacy about the human body.
Feelings ran so high that medical schools were forced to hire grave-robbers to provide anatomical specimens. Michelangelo ransacked morgues to carry out his physiology research. In the 1800s, Edinburgh University actually bought cadavers from the Burke and Hare murder gang.
That all sounds outlandish today. We wouldn’t stand in the way of essential research for such squeamish reasons. Or would we? It seems in fact that we do. The problem has to do with confidentiality. Most of us believe that when we see a doctor, what goes on in the treatment room is no one’s business but our own. We expect the record of our visit to remain private.
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