Mutter museum and the body farm

[TC2]

The thread about the Body exhibit got me thinking, and to avoid hijacking that thread, I’ll ask my ? here.
What do you think of the Mutter Museum, and the Body Farm?
The first is in Philadelphia, I believe, and the body farm is in Tennessee. The first is famous, the second less so.

The Body Farm is an area set aside where human corpses are set out in the elements, in various scenarios (half buried, underwater, in a car trunk, ect) and their decomposition studied by forensic students and experts.

What do you think of these? Do they provide a worthy service, or not? Would you go/have gone to the Mutter? Would you donate your body to the Body Farm?

 

[Zooey]

I had never heard of the Mutter Museum before…I guess I don’t know how I feel about it, really…

The Body Farm…I think that it is a worthy scientific enterprise. After all, there is no “tour for a couple of bucks”, it is strictly for research, and the bodies are all from people who have donated their bodies for research.
This is not to say that I don’t think that there could be moral questions here; it’s just that it seems more like the kind of thing as donating your body to a medical school, or the like: Eventually, the remains will be disposed of in a respectful manner, and in the mean time, there have been many advances in forensic medicine due to the Body Farm. (I actually have a friend who lives in Knoxville, and there is, she tells me, no way that the general public is going to get in there for curousity’s sake…)

 

[TC2]

Yep, I had a friend, way back, who once lived not too far from the body farm, and she wanted her body donated there when she died.
When I first learned of the farm, all I could think was ‘ewwww, gross’, but after learning more, I think it’s wonderful.

The Mutter? I’d love to go, it would be both icky and fascinating at the same time. Don’t know if I’ll ever get up there though.