Simply Smith

Those very clever scientists are coming up with all sorts of possibilities concerning the human body. Some of these, I suppose, will be more acceptable than others.

On the one side of the coin we are perhaps getting used to heart transplants, liver transplants and the rest.

These organs we cannot see and their use may be viewed both by the family of the recently deceased person and by their recipients in a favourable light.

Nevertheless, along with the surgical process inevitably goes a degree of counselling: you live because someone else has had the misfortune to die suddenly. This has to be a fact with which everyone would have to come to terms.

Even looking at the world through someone else's corneas must be a very strange sensation. If the original owner could express an opinion it is likely that he or she would have been pleased that this particular body part was giving another the gift of sight.

There must be something intensely personal about receiving part of someone who no longer lives. Most recently, it might be possible to transplant hands and perhaps other limbs. In a rather more flippant vein it brings into question some ancient associations.

Could the masonic handshake and sealing a deal with a handshake become a thing of the past: would you know whose hand you were shaking?

If the original owner were left handed would a right handed recipient become confused?

It has to be said though that the development of such a procedure could ultimately be viewed positively by most of the population.

The other side of the coin, though, seems a touch more ghoulish. In a cost cutting exercise it has been reported that Warwick District Council have installed a new central heating system at one of its crematoria.

Nothing odd about that, you might say. And you would be correct: nothing odd. Except that, for a saving of fifty per cent on its heating costs, the crematorium is using the heat from burning coffins and cadavers to supplement the institution's conventional central heating system.

Now, I'm all for keeping warm at a funeral on a winter's day but the knowledge that my comfort is at the expense of a dear friend or relation would certainly tend to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and make me shudder - and not with the cold.

Apparently, this is a common practice in Sweden, where thousands of homes benefit from this 'heat exchange'. In my opinion though the British character, practical as it frequently is, will balk at this insensitive and inappropriate treatment of the last remains of a loved one.

It seems that, if your body parts are of no use to anyone after you die the system will get you in the end.

There appears too much official assumption that people will accept what they are told to accept: to lie down meekly and be trodden on. Mrs Thatcher thought this when she stream-rollered the Poll Tax onto the Statute Book.

To those who run crematoria I say, think on, the next body may be yours.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.