Questionable Cadavers: When one of those posed cadaver exhibits came to Cleveland several months ago, a lot of my patients raved about how wonderful it was to see the intricate workings of the human body. It's one of the few times I had trouble masking my feelings about a social issue. There are just too many questions about how those bodies are obtained - questions like those being asked in New York:

Arnie Geller, the president of Premier Exhibitions Inc., the company that spent $25 million to obtain the specimens from a Chinese university, insists that the human remains, all but two of them male, are those of the poor, the unclaimed or the unidentified. Although he said he was not allowed to keep copies of documents, officials at Dalian University in northern China showed him papers attesting to the origin of the remains. The documents were kept confidential, Mr. Geller said, because international law forbids public disclosure of the identities of those who have donated their bodies to medical science.

....But Harry Wu, the executive director of the LaoGai Research Foundation, an organization that documents abuses in China's penal system, said officials from Dalian University had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, having supplied bodies to Gunter von Hagens, the German entrepreneur who started the first traveling show of the dead, "World of Bodies." Dr. Sui Hongjin, who was previously Mr. Von Hagen's Chinese partner until a falling out three years ago, is now working with Premier Exhibitions, which has its headquarters in Atlanta.

Whether the bodies were prisoners or poor people before they died, it's still wrong to display them like this without their permission.