The macabre scandal of Harvard's bodies traffic takes a new turn. University is facing a wave of processes
Harvard University. Credit Line: Joseph Presioso / AFP / Profimedia
The Harvard University can be sued by the families who accuse her of neglecting the bodies of their relatives who were donated to the school of medicine and who were then sold on the black market by the former morgue manager, a Massachusetts court has decided, Reuters reported.
The Supreme Court of Justice of the state of Massachusetts has ruled that a lower court has mistakenly rejected the Harvard University's courts to account for the “macabre scheme” of his former morgue, Cedric Lodge, through which he dissected, stole and sold parts of the bodies used by the Faculty of Medicine.
Judge Scott Kafker said that the plaintiffs had sufficiently argued that Harvard did not act in good faith in the use of bodies, whose “horrible and unworthy treatment has continued for years.” “He had the legal obligation to provide a worthy treatment of human remains and failed sadly in this regard, as Harvard even acknowledged,” Kafker wrote in motivating the decision.
The court also approved the possible complaints against the current director of the Harvard anatomical donations program. Lodge is waiting for the sentence after the process in which he pleaded as a culprit for the transport of stolen goods beyond the state border.
Prosecutors claim that the scheme of illegal use of the bodies began in 2018, through theft of corpse, such as heads, brain, leather or internal organs, which he then transported from the Morga of the University of Boston to his domicile in Goffstown, New Hampshire, from where he sold them, with the help of his wife.
In 12 separate processes, 47 relatives of the people whose bodies were donated accused the Harvard University of negligence, turning the head from Lodge's inadequate, until it was charged in 2023.
Last year, a judge decided that Harvard has immunity to the responsibility to sing the weather has acted in good faith to respect the law of anatomical donations, which regulate the donation of human bodies for research and education.
But Kafker said that the trial calls had adequately argued that Harvard did not comply with the law because he did not implement the mechanisms that could prevent Lodge from dismantling donated bodies, bringing people into the morgue to whom they sold parts of the corpse or to remove them from the morgue.
