In the event that the school can’t accept my body when I die, can I opt for a second school as an alternative?
Every medical school has a structured process for whole body donation. If you wish to donate your body to a specific program, you need to contact them and they will pre-screen you to see if you qualify for the program. If you don’t qualify, you’ll know in advance.
Even if you do pre-qualify for a whole body donation program, certain factors can cause your corpse to be rejected at the time of your death.Your donation will be disqualified if prior to your death, you have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, underwent extensive surgery, suffer traumatic injuries that led to your death, have been autopsied or if you died of certain infectious diseases. In those cases, your whole body will not qualify for donation to any other medical schools or biomedical organizations either.
Most medical schools will allow you to rank your donations. That is if you do not qualify as a whole body donor at the time of your death, certain other body parts (like your skeleton or brain, for example) can be donated to the appropriate organization/department within the medical school.
If you wish to donate your body, you cannot be a registered organ donor since your body needs to be intact when it is preserved after your death.
All of this means you need to make arrangements in advance of your death so that your family members/guardians are aware of your intentions.
Learning never stops. Did not realize the point you mentioned. Is it possible to donate my body and any body organs to the same school if they accept my body? Or due to some medical reasons, if the body is donated, organs are not taken from the body?
A whole body (cadaver) donation must be completely intact. Organs cannot be removed from the body prior to the cadaver’s use by students in anatomy lab. Since students remove and subsequently dissect all of the internal organs (including the brain) during anatomy lab, there aren’t any intact internal organs left to donate for further use at the end of anatomy lab. (At our state school, other health profession students–PT, OT, nursing, EMT, dental hygiene–have subsequent use of the cadaver once the med/PA students have finished dissecting. The cadaver is then prosected by an anatomy instructor so these students can observe & study the gross physical structures of the human body.) At the end of anatomy lab, the cadaver is cremated and the cremains returned to the family.
The skeleton might still be useable post-anatomy lab. Medical schools generally don’t need donated skeletons, although some college anthropology departments will accept skeleton donations if they teach human osteology.
Just to clarify: this means post-mortem pre anatomy removal. People who have had organs removed as part of their medical care or as a living organ donor (e.g. kidney) can still be anatomy cadavers.
Coming back to this - based on the cadavers I remember, it’s more likely that the people whose cadavers end up in anatomy lab are ineligible for organ donation. Organ donors are typically young(ish) people with brain death. The old person whose blood pressure slowly declines until it’s no longer life sustaining or who is found dead the following morning at home isn’t going to be eligible to donate. Those organs aren’t going to be transplantable regardless of the person’s wishes.