Scientific undertaking: Mortician helps donors leave healthy corpse

Once upon a time, it was almost a cliché: “I’m not going to be buried,” people would say; “I’m leaving my body to science.”

Well, in Wisconsin, science has the face of Bob Schlotthauer. He’s the senior mortician with UW–Madison’s body donation program, and he and his partner, Phil Schadler, are responsible for keeping the medical school’s cadavers as healthy as corpses can be.

“Some people get a little queasy about the idea of body donation,” says Schlotthauer. “But it’s important that medical students learn from real bodies. To be honest, if I’m going to see a doctor, I’d much rather see one who’s actually practiced on the real thing than one who’s only dealt with plastic models.”

Body donation works much like any organ donor program. Wisconsinites who wish to leave their bodies to science fill out a donation form, and when they die, their physician calls Schlotthauer and Schadler. The morticians then decide, based on the physician’s verbal description, whether the body is one that they can accept.

“We can’t accept a body if the person died of an infectious disease,” says Schlotthauer. “Nor can we take one if the person died in an accident, was autopsied, or has unhealed surgery.”

Such conditions render a cadaver useless for dissection. Jaundiced or obese bodies must also be rejected, as they embalm poorly. All told, Schlotthauer and Schadler turn down nearly a quarter of all donated bodies.

Those they accept, however, are enough to keep the university’s morticians running. They log more than 30,000 miles every year, fetching bodies back to Madison, and they must take those miles at a rigorous pace. If they’re too slow and a body begins to decompose, it’s no good to medical science.

Though a local mortician could preserve a donation, Schlotthauer and Schadler prefer to do their own embalming. They work carefully, spending two days on the preservation process. When they’re done, they can store a cadaver for months at room temperature.

“Our material is superior to what others use,” says Schlotthauer. “Once we seal a body in its plastic bag, it’ll mummify before it goes bad.”

And the cadavers have to last a long time. About 60 of the 100 or so bodies will be dissected during a semester in medical school gross anatomy classes. Others may go to hospital residency programs for surgical training, or they may be used in other body-related classes, such as kinesiology, or physical or occupational therapy.

Schlotthauer has been a UW mortician since 1980, and his priority is taking care of the donated bodies, giving all due consideration to the donors and their families. In his 22 years here, he’s never misplaced a body — or even part of one.

But in 1996, he managed to lose his own heart in the embalming room. While on the job, he met medical student Barbara Knox. She had stuck around after anatomy class, and struck up a conversation with Schlotthauer. Eventually they went out for a beer, and dating led to marriage in 2001.

“After all these years,” he says, “I finally got something lively out of this job.”