New York University medical cadavers found in mass grave

Bodies donated to New York University’s medical school have been found in unmarked mass graves on Hart Island, where New York City buries the dead it considers unclaimed and indigent. The donors, while living, had signed forms assuring them that their remains would be either returned to their families or cremated once the school had finished using them.

The number of donors to end up on Hart Island is likely to remain a mystery. A New York Times analysis of data held on 62 000 burials by the nonprofit Hart Island Project found hundreds of bodies that had been buried one to three years after their death. Most of these were believed to be medical cadavers. But there have been only four cases where identification has been possible—because of an unusual name or other exceptional information in the records.

One, Marie Muscarnera, a dressmaker and investor, left $691 700 (£480 000; €610 000) to New York University (NYU) medical school along with her body. Her brother Joseph, who had a disability and for whom she had cared, also donated his body. Both lay in separate trenches on Hart Island.

Another, Ruth Proskauer Smith, was a feminist and reproductive rights advocate. Also identified in the Hart Island records was Leo Van Witsen, an author and costume designer. He had donated his body to Columbia University, but Columbia’s medical school, not requiring it, had transferred it to NYU with his executor’s permission.

Once the bodies had served their medical purposes, NYU medical school would return the remains to family members if the appropriate box had been ticked on the donation form. Alternatively, donors could tick a box that said: “I wish my remains to be cremated and the New York University School of Medicine to be responsible for burying or spreading the cremains in a dignified manner.”

But instead of sending the bodies for cremation, which cost $380 per body, the school sent them to a Bronx morgue which dispatched them to Hart Island, where prisoners earn 50 cents an hour burying them. The cost to the university was $225.

NYU medical school said that no full accounting of the practice was likely, as some records were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, and the former director of the program, Bruce Bogart, now suffers from dementia. But the school believed that no financial motive was involved.

All donated bodies were now sent to a crematory in New Jersey, and if families did not wish the return of the ashes, they were scattered in a memorial garden.

Mel Rosenfeld, senior associate dean, expressed the school of medicine’s apologies in a statement: “We sincerely regret any actions on our part that did not reflect the wishes of those altruistic donors and their families who willingly donated their remains for medical education. We fully acknowledge this was a generous gift on their part to help further the education of our medical students. The mistakes were tied to a procedural error in which we followed the wishes of the next of kin, who may not have realized what they were agreeing to. In 2013, we instituted major changes to our disposition practices for donor remains that will ensure that we honor the donors’ wishes with regard to their remains.”

NYU is the second US medical school this year to admit losing track of medical cadavers. George Washington University said in February that it could no longer put a name to 50 cadavers it held, and several families who had received the ashes of loved ones from the university said they no longer knew whose remains they actually held.1