Maintaining the anonymity of cadavers in medical education: Historic relic or educational and ethical necessity?

Throughout the modern history of anatomical dissection by medical and other health science students, cadavers have been anonymized. This has meant that students have been provided with limited, if any, information on the identities or medical histories of those they are dissecting. While there was little way around this when the bodies were unclaimed, this need not be the case when the bodies have been donated.

I see dead people: insights from the humanities into the nature of plastinated cadavers.

Accounts from the humanities which focus on describing the nature of whole body plastinates are examined. We argue that this literature shows that plastinates do not clearly occupy standard cultural binary categories of interior or exterior, real or fake, dead or alive, bodies or persons, self or other and argue that Noël Carroll's structural framework for horrific monsters unites the various accounts of the contradictory or ambiguous nature of plastinates while also showing how plastinates differ from horrific fictional monsters. In doing so, it offers an account of the varied reactions of those responding to exhibitions of plastinated whole bodies.

Who gets born? How did New Zealand's Bioethics Council arrive at its recommendations?

The Bioethics Council's Report Who Gets Born? elicited considerable public comment with its recommendation regarding the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for sex selection for social reasons. The Report was based on a process of deliberative consultation, in which determined efforts had been expended to obtain the views of ordinary New Zealanders. Consequently, the manner in which the recommendations, including this particular one on sex selective PGD, were informed by the consultation is of considerable interest.