So Gregor Mendel (yes, the guy with the pea plants) wrote down that he wanted to be given a thorough autopsy after he died. The year he died was 1884. Autopsies were increasingly common at the time, but Mendel was an Augustinian friar and the arguments preventing donating your body to science for teaching autopsies, research, etc. were theological. TheĀ āethicalā source of teaching cadavers for doctors to autopsy was (in many places) the bodies of executed criminals, as a sort of post-mortem punishment.Ā Mendel became a monk specifically becauseĀ he couldnāt afford to study otherwise, even after one of his sisters donated her dowry to the cause. He did too well as a monk to continue his work as long as he wanted: he got promoted to Abbott and the last sixteen years of his life were spent doing administrative work, and his experiments werenāt properly replicated, or examined as a viable alternative to then current theories on inheritance, until 1900. But he chose to donate his body to science (which he loved) and be of material benefit to the field of medicine, which he didnāt practice but two of his nephews did.Ā Thereās just something beautiful about a guy who lived through the era where having your body dissected was the height of dishonor, in an institution that had advocated against the practice, deciding that anything that helps humanity as a whole was worth doing. Thereās something just as beautiful about the fact that he was exhumed for genetic sequencing on his 200th birthday - usually we donāt just dig people up and grab their genes as a surprise party, because in addition to it being a lot of work we canāt assume they would have appreciated it, but Mendel? He would have been jazzed.Ā
