Vintage Offbeat: A public autopsy

Something Offbeat

For our second anniversary, we’re looking back at one of our first episodes! ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION: It’s not hard to find gruesome, macabre images or videos – they’re on TV, in horror movies and online. But what if you wanted to see them in person? Through a series of donations and transactions, the body of a 98-year-old World War II veteran from Louisiana ended up on a table in an Oregon hotel ballroom where attendees paid as much as $500 to view a public dissection. Dr. Gail Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine and host of the “How Can I Help?" podcast, explains what drives people to seek out such spectacles and what that fascination with death can tell us about ourselves and our society.