It’s actually pretty noble, I think. Really, what use do any of us have for our bodies after we die? They serve no viable purpose. They’re toxic waste, and they just take up space. If we were all ancient Egyptians and were planning to be mummified, maybe, but there isn’t a lot of that mummification stuff going on today. Why NOT donate your body to Science, to help advance learning? Remembering how the medical schools of the past had to resort to graverobbing, or the hiring of graverobbers, ergo graverobbing by proxy, to obtain bodies on which to practice surgery, if you can help a future surgeon develop his skills and potentially save numerous lives, that’s noble, isn’t it? Even if your body ends up being used for vehicle crash tests, which isn’t infrequent, or ballistics testing, it can still do some good, right?
I honestly don’t know that the treatment of a human body after death matters in the least to the dead. I don’t know if the dead are aware of it at all. Why, then, would doctors, these men of Science and emotionless reason, conduct funerals for the bodies after they are through slicing and dicing them for the sake of learning? It has far more to do with the need of the living to acknowledge that a corpse, a thing of cold clay, once contained life. It is reverence for life itself that impels such activity. To lose it would imply a troubling loss of humanity in the living people doing the dissecting.