When my father was a teenager, a friend of his father's was a fireman. In a professional building where they had put out a fire, they found a box with a skeleton that had been prepared for teaching purposes. While the fire wasn't hot enough to destroy the skeleton, it did ruin the mounting, discolor the bones, and render some of the smaller bones cracked and brittle.

The owners of the building didn't want the specimen since they didn't think it was fit for teaching anymore. The fireman - knowing that my father wanted to follow in my grandfather's footsteps and be a doctor - presented my my father with the still perfectly-good, hinged-jaw skull.

During the year, the skull sits in a discreet corner of the bookcase - people not expecting to find it are usually startled when they are looking through my parents' book collection. (As kids, we used to love to send unwary babysitters into the library just for that purpose.) At Halloween, the skull is an integral part of the presentation - it's usually in the middle of the pile of candy. Some kids are seriously freaked out by it, some are fascinated. Most everyone, though, does a double-take and is startled when they realize it's real.

For some reason, I suspect who ever donated their body for science never intended for it to be used as a novelty down the line. In the course of my career, I have worked with human remains for many years. I am a strong believer that they should always be treated with the utmost respect.

When I was in medical school, everyone was my class was loaned a skull to take home and study. We were instructed to never use them for candy dishes or candleholders (not only because it's disrespectful but real human skulls are very delicate, especially the little holes in the base where the cranial nerves go). I had never heard of anyone in my class "abusing" them, but I think everyone did end up putting them on display. I kept mine on the dining room table on top of a doily. I don't remember anyone getting creeped out by it, but then I didn't have many visitors : )

I was reminded of an NPR story a while back about some actors requesting a real human skull when they play Hamlet (Jude Law, I think, had done this.) It ends up being a major undertaking because the skull usually winds up broken after only one "performance". Supposedly, some famous actors had it written in their wills to have their own skulls used to "play" Yorick so that they could be on stage one last time.

For all but one day of the year, the skull is in a quiet corner of my father's library, next to some of his medical reference books. In fact, we kids were only allowed to touch it (let alone move it) once we were of tween age and treated it with respect. Because my parents let us know it wasn't a toy, it had been a real person's skull. It was never, ever, ever a toy - just something you usually don't see in someone's house.

Once a year, it sits on a table at Halloween where kids can see it (and never touch it). While some are scared, others are fascinated, and several have told my parents they went on to careers in medicine or science because it was so interesting to them. I would hope that that's a legacy the donor could get behind - that their skull is cared for and treated with respect by a medical professional (after the rest of the body had been disposed of, probably unceremoniously as it had been badly burned and was already not in use being in a box in a basement) and inspired some kids to learn more about science. I doubt it would still be in circulation as a teaching skeleton after 50 years.