Law Suit Imperils Cadaver Supply for Medical School

The Medical School has instructed its counsel to follow closely the progress of a pending Salem lawsuit whose outcome may seriously curtail the School's supply of cadavers for student dissection.

In the action, a Salem woman is suing an undertaker for $10,000 damages, charging that he took the corpse of her brother, an inmate of a State mental hospital, and delivered it to a Professor of Anatomy at the Boston University School of Medicine for dissection by students. Suits have also been threatened against the hospital superintendent and the Boston University School of Medicine.

The Schools here and at Boston University are concerned because, as an official said her yesterday, "If the woman wins her suit, hospital superintendents and undertakers would probably be too frightened of possible consequences in the future to make any more cadavers available for students to dissect."

Supply Corpses

A State law permits superintendents of state institutions to supply medical schools with the corpses of inmates, provided no next of kin is known.

Plaintiff's counsel in the Salem case has charged that the authorities failed to make a satisfactory search for the deceased's relatives, of whom several were alive. He also alleges several other irregularities in procedure.

Henry C. Meadow, assistant dean of the Faculty of Medicine, yesterday emphasized the importance of the cadavers to medical students. "There would be a tremendous impact on medical education if the medical schools were unable to obtain anatomical material," he said.

The cadavers, already in short supply, are used by first-year anatomy students State institutions are their principal source of supply.

The Harvard, Boston University, and Tufts Medical Schools were all represented in the Essex County Superior Court in Salem about two weeks ago when the defendant undertaker was heard in a criminal proceeding. Charges of altering the death certificate, violating sepulchre and selling a dead body were dismissed.

The civil action was filed soon afterwards in court. Damages of $250,000 were asked when the suit was instituted, but the amount was subsequently lowered.