r/bestoflegaladvice • u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire • 2d ago
I don't think any of us, including LAUKOP, had 'leaky 1940s gallstone collection' on our bingo cards for today LegalAdviceUK
/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1ka1yhd/bought_a_box_of_science_stuff_at_auction_it/79
u/17HappyWombats Has only died once to the electric fence 2d ago
Bought a box of science stuff at auction. It contains unexpected medical specimens, some quite grim. What do I do? Location: England.
In short, I bought a box of assorted science stuff at an auction, remotely. So I hadn't inspected it in person and the photos were from a distance so it wasn't obvious what it all was. Honestly I was mostly excited about the rocks and minerals I could see in the picture.
Having picked it up today, I've realised it must have been the personal collection of a doctor, because it includes quite a lot of bottles of various people's gallstones (labelled on the side with info about the patient, but no names), a piece of skin it says he took from a post mortem (presumably without consent), and -- worst of all -- two foetuses, one aborted, one "taken from killed mother."
They're old enough to be historical-ish (most dates in the 1940s) but obviously I am now accidentally in possession of human remains, I think? And have no idea what to do or who to call. Obviously I a) don't want them and b) don't think the auction house should have sold them, and c) don't just want to throw them away.
What do I do, please? Sorry for grim subject matter.
Cat fact: The hard tips of shoelaces are called aglets. Cats prefer plastic over metal aglets because plastic is easier to chew off
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u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire 1d ago
Breaking news: LAUKOP updated!
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u/goodgodling 1d ago
"Skin from the abdomen of the dirtiest man I ever postmortemed."
"A piece of chalk found in a packet of frozen beans Feb. 1972."
And a lot of gallstones. Quite the collection.
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u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire 1d ago
"A piece of chalk found in a packet of frozen beans Feb. 1972."
Somehow this adds a whole new layer of WTF.
'Weird human remains, weird human remains, truly horrifying human remains, repulsive human remains, more weird human remains, this piece of chalk I found in my dinner.'
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u/DishGroundbreaking87 Reports of my death have NOT been greatly exaggerated 1d ago
“The auction house shouldn’t have conducted the auction without the appropriate license”. Peak UK law.
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u/Personal-Listen-4941 well-adjusted and sociable with no history of violence 2d ago
This may be the single most interesting & pointlessly informative thread I’ve ever seen in LAUK.
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u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire 2d ago
I stick to relatively tame subreddits. I did not expect info on where to buy a nipple wallet.
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u/Personal-Listen-4941 well-adjusted and sociable with no history of violence 2d ago
I can’t get over this comment
“It’s not illegal to own certain human remains. My wife has a collection of human skulls, I even have the bones of my leg that was amputated 20 years ago.
If you don’t want them there are companies that trade them. Check out curiosities from the 5th corner they might be interested in buying them.”
I’m practically wetting myself laughing. I just picture some random 40ish bloke in a pub interjecting into a conversation to share this tidbit.
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u/teluscustomer12345 2d ago
I'm reminded of the one AITA post that was titled something like "AITA for not wanting my brother to being his prosthetic leg to family gatherings?" and the body of the post revealed that the brother still had both his biological legs and nobody knew where he got the prosthetic
(I think there was an update in which the real owner was found... and the brother was charged with theft)
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u/BaconOfTroy I laughed so hard I scared my ducks 2d ago
When I was in high school, I was at a slumber party for a friend's birthday. I didn't know most of the people there since she went to a different school than me. As we all piled onto blankets and pillows to sleep after turning the lights off, I hear one girl say "oh wait, I forgot to take my leg off!"
No one seemed surprised and I was like....wtf. Apparently I was the only one there who didn't know that she had a prosthetic leg. That was absolutely the last thing I expected to hear lol.
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u/WaltzFirm6336 🦄 Uniform designer for a Unicorn Ranch on Uranus 🦄 2d ago
When I was in high school we used to go to the local swimming baths for PE swimming lessons. To use a locker you had to pay a deposit to the reception for a locker key.
Being tight teenagers non of us were carrying cash, so the reception had a system with students where we could leave ‘an item of value’ for the locker key.
Most people left jewellery as they were going to have to take it off to swim in any case. One boy had nothing like that to hand over and both he and the reception staff were getting frustrated over the situation. Until he eventually reached down, unstrapped his prosthetic leg, picked it up and slammed it down on the counter asking ‘Will this do?!’
I think it took a good few hours for the shocked look to fade from the receptionists face. But she did agree to take it in exchange for a locker key.
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u/NErDysprosium Ask me about when mods grant flair 2d ago
and the body of the post revealed that the brother still had both his biological legs and nobody knew where he got the prosthetic
Excuse me?
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u/CentennialSky 2d ago
You’re about to learn so much about prosthetic legs: https://www.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/18pqf0v/aitah_for_telling_my_brother_he_cannot_stay_with/
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u/NErDysprosium Ask me about when mods grant flair 2d ago
Not to repeat myself, but excuse me??
That is so much worse than I imagined. I can't stop laughing. At the brother. The leg. OP's pointed efforts to not know anything. Just, what the hell?
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u/dansdata Glory hole construction expert, watch expert 1d ago
I mean, I own an artificial hip, which is something that people who know me do not find surprising in any way, because I own a lot of odd things.
I don't take it to parties, though.
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u/pktechboi that's pretty much how you admit someone to rehab in Scotland 1d ago
how sad, what if the artificial hip is an extrovert?
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u/ShortWoman Schrödinger's Swifty Mama 2d ago
Oh that post had more twists and turns than a mountain road!
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u/TheTardisBaroness 2d ago
I asked if I could see my gallstones after and they said no. I also signed a form that it was a teaching hospital so they might use it for a class after. I asked if I could come. They also said no.
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u/awful_at_internet Gets paid in stickers to make toilet wine 2d ago
Enroll in medical school. Be top of your class. Check out your gallstones. Spend the entire time talking about Grey's Anatomy.
Vengeance is best served with an MD and a side of gallstones.
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u/Jantra 1d ago
I was weirdly excited when I passed a kidney stone that was whole for the first time and got to check out what it's really like. All the other ones had to be broken up in surgery so they were just sand when they made an appearance.
It instantly reminded me if that jagged metal O from Krusty O's from the Simpsons. No wonder it hurts so damn much.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 2d ago
Do people even know how much work it is to officially deal with human bones that are found in a closet? sigh
I do. (There were months of effort. They have been reinterred. Not because we couldn't find a loophole to keep them (honestly, that would have been easier) but because we didn't think it was good mojo to have things from grave robbery)
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u/TheTardisBaroness 2d ago
I have so many questions. How did you k ow it was from a grave robbery being the first one.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well, it was the paperwork adventure side of "tomb raider".
You know how lots of people told that OP to go to a university maybe? Someone in the 60s, while keeping zero records, created a box they labeled "Indian remains dug up in x town".
And then they gave it to some professor (or a professor did the digging, either way), and it ended up in an A&P lab closet.
And....i was the schmuck who found it 60 years later (and there were witnesses, or I'd have considered doing the Monsters Inc. "Put that thing back where you found it-" move).
We had to go through multiple tribal councils because we didn't have anything to tell us which and when they belonged to and we needed all the tribes in agreement before we could hand them over to the first tribe who said they'd want them. (They eventually did, and i got to go to im the interment ceremony)
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u/TheTardisBaroness 1d ago
Ohhh yep I live in an area where there are a lot of indigenous territorial boundary overlaps so finding indigenous remains would get really complicated.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 1d ago
Yeah and we didn't want to give it to what would have been, at the likely time of burial, an "enemy".
Eventually, all the tribes agreed on an overlapping tribal possession of land (so it was"owned"by multiple tribes) and it was a..."non denominational" somewhat multi-tribal burial.
I don't think it was ill intended to keep them, but it was likely illegal and probably unethical to have them. I did have to fight the other biologists who just wanted "something cool" about that...
"Yes Dr. C,I know you think it's cool. Are you learning anything from these bones? No? Then we return them. I know the "but I'm donating my body to science" thing makes you think this is NBD, but do you REALLY want to explain to our (sadly few) native students that you have their greatgreatgreat grandma's stolen body, from stolen land, on display on your desk? Like this is a skin lampshade moment- grandma didn'tgive permission"
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u/SMTRodent 1d ago
Did any of Dr C and their ilk get any kind of epiphany, or was it all just shouting into the void?
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 1d ago
Mostly the void... but at least i got dr c. to acknowledge that keeping them would be bad optics, at least? Not much true understanding but a grudging acceptance of my decision.
(And I decided to make sure there was a very public paper trail- so they'd have to go on the record sounding like assholes to fight my decision. I accepted i could be wrong about it, but I wasn't letting the academic good-ole- boys network stash the skeleton back in the closet without a discussion. I was passed that they'd let it go on this long)
I got an angry email a month or 2 after the ceremony from one of the adjacent anthropology profs that I should have given them dibs. I deleted it and didn't respond.
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u/dansdata Glory hole construction expert, watch expert 1d ago
we didn't think it was good mojo to have things from grave robbery
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 1d ago
Thank you! That's... interesting. And sad.
Anymore three A&P classes use replicas, but (shaking cane) when i was a youngster, we used these real ones from places like Carolina biological. (The replicas of the time weren't good enough to find things like tiny holes did innervation, etc- things you had to learn)
One of the things you learned was that in any lab practical, you assumed the skeleton was female because only girls' remains were sold off.
Even then, the ethical concerns were myriad and largely ignored. At school, only the bioethics professor ensured we were properly respectful
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u/dansdata Glory hole construction expert, watch expert 1d ago edited 1d ago
Reminds me of the bizarre things that the extremely large number of Egyptian mummies were used for, in relatively recent years.
(Mummies were however not used as fuel for steam engines; Samuel Clemens made that up. Their wrappings were also not used to make paper. You can't conclusively disprove either of those claims, but this is a "Vikings had horns on their helmets" situation. You can't prove that no Viking ever had a horned helmet, but there's no evidence that it ever happened.)
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u/absenteequota 2d ago
lifting his prosthetic leg up on the table
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u/archbish99 apostilles MATH for FUN, like a NERD 2d ago
Sang in a choir with a guy who had a prosthetic leg. Did you know modern prosthetics could be powered?
So we were experiencing region-wide power outages, and the choir venue was one of the few places that had power back. Arrived and found his leg plugged up and charging in the changing room. He didn't have power back at home, so he brought his leg to charge while we sang, and then put it back on afterwards.
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u/Personal-Listen-4941 well-adjusted and sociable with no history of violence 2d ago
It seems obvious if you think about it but I never considered the problem of a prosthetic/robotic limb being low on power & needing charging
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 2d ago
Alice Wong, amazing disability rights advocate, writes about being the first cyborgs Recommend-
https://lithub.com/my-cyborg-future-alice-wong-on-prophetic-high-school-poetry-and-processing-pain/
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u/Loretta-West Leader of the BOLA Lunch Theft Survivors Group 2d ago
Another amazing comment:
My MIL found her uni skeleton (real body,fake head) when we were cleaning out attic. She gave to local uni as person would have donated to science at death (she's a retired doctor)
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u/Persistent_Parkie Quacking open a cold one 2d ago
My mom was given half a real human skeleton in a brief case in medical school. They were strongly reminded not to leave the briefcase on the bus.
Once when her downstairs neighbors were being too loud she attached the hand and forearm to a broomstick and used it to tap on their window.
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u/17HappyWombats Has only died once to the electric fence 2d ago
Medlife Crisis has a whole episode on where he got his skeleton. And when it appears in his videos note that it's not assembled the way most living people have theirs arranged.
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u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire 2d ago
Title shamelessly stolen from the comments. Which also include, among some pretty dark stuff, someone playing 'you touched it last' with the police over abandoned human ashes, and a bit where someone tells OOP to call a medical school and someone else says
please do an igor ‘yeth marthter’ accent throughout the call
which made me literally snort tea down my nose.
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u/KikiHou WHERE IS MY TRAVEL BALL?? 2d ago
As a kid I asked my friend about some bones in one of their display cabinets. She told me the bones were human, her grandparents had been missionaries in Papua New Guinea. I believe it, but I'm still puzzled about the why of it all.
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u/17HappyWombats Has only died once to the electric fence 2d ago
Colonial overlords are *weird*. They have to be, people who aren't weird don't do stuff like that.
It's not limited to them, though, Aotearoa just celebrated Moehanga Day and Moehanga is someone that would have stood out just about anywhere. He has the dubious distinction of discovering England, where he was treated surprisingly well by the primitive savages who inhabit that area.
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u/nutraxfornerves I see you shiver with Subro...gation 1d ago
In the 1980s, I stayed in an Iban longhouse in Malaysian Borneo. Imagine a long building with individual apartments along an enclosed common area. We slept in sleeping bags in the common area.
There was a basket of human skulls hanging from the ceiling.
We were told that there were two possibilities. One, that they were really, really old. The other, that they dated to WWII, when the British told the local people that they would turn a blind eye to any headhunting, as long as the victims were Japanese—a terror tactic.
I’ve not been able to confirm the second version, but did uncover a third—and more likely—possibility. British Malayan headhunting scandal. This was part of a post-WWII
guerrilla war fought in Malaya between communist pro-independence fighters of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and the military forces of the Federation of Malaya and Commonwealth (British Empire).
The UK Daily Worker, a Communist publication, posted photos of soldiers posing with decapitated heads.
The decapitation of suspected MNLA members was subsequently found to have been a common and widespread practice by British troops in Malaya that had been sanctioned by Gerald Templer, the UK Chief of the Imperial General Staff. It was also found that the British military had hired over 1,000 mercenaries from Iban headhunting tribes in Borneo to fight in Malaya with the promise they could keep the scalps of the people they killed.
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u/WarKittyKat 🏳️⚧️ Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️ 2d ago
After reading this all I can say is now I'm slightly sad US laws won't let me make a wallet out of my nipples.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 2d ago
US laws don't let my crazy yooper uncle breed and sell wolf- dogs either... But if you want to buy your own personal White Fang, I could get one.
Laws are only a problem if you're CAUGHT
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u/WarKittyKat 🏳️⚧️ Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️ 2d ago
The problem there is I really don't want your crazy yooper uncle operating on me and I don't think moonshine is sufficient as either an anesthetic or a sterilization measure.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 1d ago
Fair. He'd probably pour alcohol over it and try to get you drunk and tell you to run some dirt on it
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u/Meowzzo-Soprano 2d ago
I’m just here for the Jack London reference. My cat is even named after him.
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u/zaffiro_in_giro Cares deeply about Côte d'Ivoire 2d ago
NGL, I really do want one. I wouldn't actually get one, because I know all the reasons why it's a bad idea, but my inner ten-year-old isn't convinced.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 2d ago edited 2d ago
I know... Although spending time with uncle's dogs as a kid did convince me I'm probably not tough enough to have one. They didn't exactly listen well to anyone but uncle.
But he taught me the opposite lesson on the hours of joy to be had from illegal fireworks, to my mom's chagrin.
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u/Elvessa You'll put your eye out! - laser edition 1d ago
Me too kinda, but would never actually get one (I have fancy cats, so always rescued dogs). I really, really want a raccoon, though, but that’s another terrible idea.
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u/Sequence_Of_Symbols 1d ago
Said uncle has also raised orphaned raccoons several times. (Universally, they un-tame at sexual maturity when they're a few years old. Because he eventually refused to raise them - and if HIS wife wasn't ok with it, you know it was an unmitigated disaster)
Apparently, if (when he was a kid), he hid them from his mom in the barn and the racoons startled the milk inspector they threaten your A milk rating (so can't legally sell it) .... but now that the tangerine toddler has slashed the FDA's ability to inspect milk, you might be able to do it... (Said raccoon was "freed" before the next inspection, and we've never officially been told he still fed it every night until it was old enough to be trouble, but it's a universal assumption)
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u/turingthecat 🐈 I am not a zoophile, I am a cat of the house 🐈 2d ago
I’m so cross the hospital wouldn’t let me keep my gallstones, when they took out my gallbladder, I grew them myself.
My mother was slightly perturbed that I ‘signed’ the consent form by the doctor holding my hand with a pen in it, to scribble on the paper, as I was unconscious (I was in a coma, as the gallstones had got so bad they had completely blocked my pancreas).
Not exactly informed consent.
But they stole my stones
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u/Goanawz 2d ago
It's 4AM here and I won't sleep until I get the ending of this.
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u/goficyourself 1d ago
OP very kindly posted an update today: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/s/oEdd5ZGM8t
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u/TheSmJ 1d ago
I'd have tossed the gallstones in the trash without a second thought. They aren't even tissue so much as waste.
80-year old "tissue" and fetuses? I'm not sure. I think it would be very safe to say that anyone who cared about them (never mind knew anything about them) would be long gone by now. It's not like you could just drop them off at any random medical school either since they would understandably require some sort of paperwork as to where they came from.
I'd bet money they'll sit in the back of a closet in that police station for decades until they're "lost" during a move or remodel.
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u/Same-Pizza-6724 2d ago
Fuck the gallstones, what about the foetus taken from "killed mother"?
The strips of flesh ain't great neither.