Philanthropy of the Body

What motivates people to donate their bodies, and how has medical voluntarism changed over the last century?

Dr. Lederer is the Ronald L. Numbers Professor of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. A historian of American medicine, she has written extensively on the history of animal and human experimentation. Her books include “Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in 20th Century America” (Oxford University Press, 2008), “Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), and “Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature” (Rutgers University Press, 2002).

This September 26, 2018, science cafe program was the fourth of a series funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant (#1611953) whose principal investigator was Karen Rader, historian of science Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Humanities and Sciences in Richmond, Virginia.