I have before me the application packet for whole body donation to the medical school of a Sydney University. Living, as I do, in regional New South Wales it’s difficult to find someone to take my usefully dead body—and I don’t want my own university getting it. They’ve got enough out of my living body, without them working my corpse as well. To be punctiliously literal, I wouldn’t be seen dead at my university.

Donating your body to science is an old practice, although those poor stiffs that ended up in the grave-robber’s wheelbarrow in the 1820s didn’t volunteer themselves to the advancement of the anatomical understanding of their betters, those gentlemen gloved in rubber to their elbows to keep the muck off their shirt-cuffs. Now, donating your body to science is the rationalist’s ultimate gesture–the altruistic last turn of a life shuttered by the conviction that the earthly world is it; that the only way we can give the explanations we  still owe the living is by making ourselves empirically useful.

Donating your whole body to science is a  democratic final option, in the sense that programs  for whole body donation don’t discriminate so narrowly about who they’ll take. The question of viability isn’t so pressing as it is in organ donation: one does not need to be an assemblage of harvestable organs, just a body: even an aged body, or a body eaten up by (non-communicable) disease. The one requirement of whole body donation is wholeness, as if those charming sticklers at the receiving centres of medical schools were all St Augustines in disguise, the airside greeters of everything we have been, are, or ever will be. Of course, that the body must be whole means the option isn’t there for amputees to donate, and gift-of-life minded donors  who want to find a useful place for parcel, as well as part, will be out of luck.

My interest in whole body donation is pointed. The only Human Body Farm in the Southern Hemisphere is being established just down the mountains from where I live– handy, since that puts it within the magical 40 km radius of free transport for my corpse to the facility, should the whole of me shuffle off the mortal coil in that vicinity. It is  even possible that the body farm will be more inclusive and accepting of which bodies it takes. Obese people are currently excluded from more run-of-the-mill whole-body donation, but you’d hope the body farm would welcome them. If the purpose of the facility is to advance forensic knowledge about human decomposition, then surely the researchers would want the widest range of bodies they could get. Murder is no respecter of persons and those shallow graves should be open to all. I for one aim to please, to be whole (in body, if not in mind), and trim (though not trimmed)—of a piece, as they say. I’m an excellent candidate for a shallow grave, for mossy skin and beetled brows. I have spent an academic lifetime studying murder, and still keenly feel the sting of a reviewer’s comment that I’d been too partial to my murderers—that by taking their part I’d failed the victims in some signal human way. But when I ‘buy the farm’ (or the farm barters me, for use-value only)  I’ll even all accounts, wipe free all slates. I belong in one of those shallow graves—and aim to be there, in good time.