Continuum

Bodies are donated to the U for future doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals to better understand human anatomy, and to practice operations and life-saving procedures. They’ve helped develop artificial hearts, lungs, and vertebrae; assisted in the creation of genetic tests; improved catheters, intubation techniques, and methods to harvest stem cells. They’ve also enhanced knee, spine, and brain operations. And they’ve expanded what researchers and doctors know about dementia, autism, strokes, and other conditions.

“The sacrifice the family makes is, they wake up every morning and mom’s not in the ground,” Peterson says. “They look toward the University of Utah and go, ‘Mom’s being worked on today. I wonder how long that’s gonna last?’ Because they care. … Somebody needs to look out for their interests.”

Peterson calls the donors “bars of gold”—and he is their guardian.

LEARNING THE ROPES

Peterson estimates he has embalmed around 10,000 bodies, both through his 34 years at the U and 13 as a funeral director. He even co-wrote a human anatomy dissection guide.

As a child, the last place he pictured working was at a morgue. Growing up in the rural northern Utah town of Tremonton, he hunted and fished and cleaned his own game. But he avoided the mortuary when he rode his bike downtown. “The mortuary creeped me out,” he says.

Years later, after working long hours pulling sugar beets from the frozen mud while in high school, the idea of working at the morgue didn’t seem so bad. And when the opportunity came up, he took it. Peterson started out washing the hearse, running errands, vacuuming the chapel—with his head firmly averted from the body in the coffin.

Eventually, he began to understand and appreciate the nuances of the funeral business. “It’s art, science, law, business,” he explains. But, the “big hook,” he says, is that on a family’s worst day after a loved one’s death, “you’re the guy they call.”

He brought that sense of reverence and family service to the U’s Body Donor Program. But when Peterson arrived, he says, the U wasn’t ready to face its fears, either.

THE EARLY DAYS

The U’s medical school opened in 1905 as a two-year program taught by “frontier doctors.” There was no law allowing students to study cadavers, but a photo from the time shows what may have been the first human cadaver used at the school. The picture of men wearing white smocks, but no gloves, gathered around a decomposing body on a medical table hangs in Peterson’s office.

The U’s “donors” were mostly the poor—sent by cooperating county physicians who were allowed to dispose of unclaimed bodies—until the 1930s or 1940s, when Edward I. Hashimoto BA’30 (and medical certificate, 1932), a U anatomy professor from 1935 to 1985, created the U’s first body donor program. Peterson joined the U at the end of Hashimoto’s tenure.

But even then, the program flew under the radar. “We didn’t have literature. We didn’t have a number in the phone book. People who wanted to donate their bodies to science called the general number of the university hospital, and they’d get transferred all over until they finally sometimes got to us,” Peterson recalls. “They had to be persistent.”

In Peterson’s telling, the body donor program was viewed by some as a potential liability. Nobody wanted to end up as front-page news like the University of California, Irvine. In the late 1990s, the director of their body donor program was caught stealing and selling body parts and losing track of donors. At the time, Peterson testified about how programs should be run.

“This business has been strewn with scandal from the day anybody even thought about drawing anatomy,” Peterson says, explaining that body snatchers in the 1800s stole corpses from graves and sometimes committed murder to supply anatomy professors and medical students.

Controversies in other parts of the country aren’t ancient history: Earlier this year, a man in Michigan who sold or leased donated body parts went on trial for defrauding customers by selling infected body parts.

Even though the U’s program hasn’t been involved in such controversy, when Peterson first started he was told to keep the phone number hidden. In the late 1980s, after having to turn away potential research recruits because the U didn’t have enough bodies to meet the demand for study, Peterson placed an ad in the Yellow Pages under the category of “pre-need” funeral arrangements, and the program got its own listing in the phone book. With a little publicity, and some literature, donations doubled from 40 to 80 that year.

Jane Nelson

‘DOING HER WORK’

When Lori Ellen Nelson BS’86 died last year of complications related to Crohn’s disease, her death was unexpected. But the 56-year-old’s plans for after were very clear: Printed on a white sheet of paper were the music and Bible verses she wanted at her funeral, along with decorations of “bright, happy wildflowers,” and a short list of other requests.

Her first priority on that list: that her body go to the U, which made perfect sense to her family. She was a teacher (winner of the Huntsman Award for Excellence) and would want her body to benefit the training of the next generation of physicians and researchers.

When her mother, Jane Nelson BS'60 MEd'87, called the Body Donor Program for an update, she was happy to hear that her daughter’s body was continuing what she did in life. “ ‘Well, let me look her up,’ ” Jane recalls a program employee telling her. “ ‘Yes, she’s currently doing her work at Snow College.’ And that made me feel good,” Jane says.

Jane’s mother, Nadine Baker, may have inspired Lori. Baker also gave her body to the U after she died at age 93 in 2002. Both devout Christians, they were certain that their bodies could be put to better use. Jane recalls her mother saying, “Jane, now why would anybody want to put a dead body in the ground when you know that I’m in heaven with the Lord? … You know they can really learn from me.”

Initially, Jane wasn’t so sure. And the thought of her mother’s body being cut bothered her. Talking to Peterson put her at ease. “He assured me by saying, ‘We are respectful. She will be given a name. She will be cared for.’ And it just made me feel peaceful, that this was something she wanted and that they would take care of her and honor her.”