unclaimed

He imagined a future in which “resources and livable conditions are scarce. Scarcity is the rule, and requires a degree of self-interest. Population problems are beyond solution by migration. No habitable unclaimed lands remain.”

In these cases, unclaimed bodies are sometimes sent to and accepted by medical schools, but several experts in the field object to the practice, raising ethical concerns that these people never consented to being dissected in life.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020, one medical student shared her experience finding out that her first patient was in fact an unclaimed body after she had already sliced into him with a scalpel.

There is no central database to count how many unclaimed dead bodies are reported each year nationally, and practices vary depending on the state or county in question.

In Texas, the proportion of unclaimed bodies accepted by medical schools increased from 2% to 14% between 2017 and 2021, according to a 2023 study in JAMA.