Show Notes
When news of the Harvard morgue scandal went viral, no one was hit harder than the families of people who had donated their bodies for study at the nation's most prestigious medical school. As if grieving the loss of a loved one wasn't enough, now there was this: the specter of a family member's body dismembered and sold to strangers for profit.
In Episode 2 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, reporter Ally Jarmanning talks with Amber Haggstrom, whose mother donated her body to Harvard after death. We hear Haggstrom's outrage and raw emotion as she learns the news — and her frustration at Harvard's lack of answers as to how it failed to protect her mother's body.
We hear, too, from the attorney representing the families, and trying to hold Harvard accountable.
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More from Last Seen
In this update episode of Postmortem, reporter Ally Jarmanning updates us on the criminal cases against Harvard Medical School's former morgue manager Cedric Lodge, his wife Denise, and Jeremy Pauley, whose arrest first exposed the nationwide network of human remains trading. All were sentenced to time in federal prison.
Introducing “What Remains,” a special series from NHPR’s Outside/In. A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A movement grows to “abolish the collection.” The Penn Museum relents to pressure. But there are more skeletons in the closet.
In Episode 5 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, reporter Ally Jarmanning digs deeper into the "legitimate" realm of body-parts collecting — museums — and asks the burning question: How different is this from the world of Jeremy Pauley in his basement or Cedric Lodge seizing a financial opportunity at Harvard's morgue.
As haunting as the Harvard morgue scandal is, you don't have to go back very far in history to find practices for sourcing bodies that would be shocking today. Reporter Ally Jarmanning finds that for more than a century, medical schools relied on grave robbing and body snatching to supply anatomical dissection classes.
Who are the people buying this stuff anyway? People who collect human remains don’t see it as gross. In fact, these collectors connect and communicate openly on social media. In Episode 3 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, reporter Ally Jarmanning meets Jeremy Pauley, the Pennsylvania man with a tattooed eye whose arrest unravels this whole case.