An arm is a little less, that will cost you 614. But a hand you get for a knockdown 300 quid. Catherine

Nixie writes about Britain for The Economist. As

always, these prices aren't the whole thing. So postage and packaging add to the cost for shipping fresh frozen corpses from America. And not without reason, because it can be tricky. A leg needs a lot of ice to keep it frozen. These things can defrost at awkward moments. They can really puzzle customs officials if they open the wrong box. But overall, I mean, human body parts are surprisingly cheap. Buying an arm and an egg doesn't cost an arm and an egg. Sorry, Catherine, hold on a minute.

Why have you been shopping for body parts? do I need to get the police in?

No, not for me. There's a lively international trade in dead human body parts for medical dissection and that allows medical professionals to practice on real dead humans before they get their hands on real live ones. Britain, like most countries, has always been bad about talking about how surgeons are trained. Until the 16th century, was just flat out. Forbidden in Britain, it was a combination of sanctity and squeamishness meant nobody would allow it. We had early attempts at entrepreneurship and opening up the market. There were two Edinburgh-based entrepreneurs who are now very famous called Birkenhair, and they tried to invigorate the market by killing people on demand. And actually, Birkenhair really did sully the reputation of anatomists for quite a long time.

But surely lots has changed since then. I mean, with all this talk of AI and its many, many possibilities, couldn't much of this be done virtually?

Yes, and it is. And since the pandemic, it's increasingly been done virtually. But there are still loads of things that flesh and blood can do that AI can't do, such as, as it was explained to me, making medics faint. There's usually one, apparently. Looking at a model, all doctors say this, it's not quite the same as having the real thing in front of you. The variation you see on the surface of humans is absolutely nothing compared to what lies beneath. And actually, if you're listening, you can try this. If you take your thumb and your little finger and you pinch them together as hard as you can with your arm flat and then you move your hand upwards towards you, you will see one tendon going down your arm, but some people will see two. And there's that kind of variation all throughout your body. Textbooks will tell you that there are three branches coming off the aorta as it leaves the heart. It's really common for people to have two branches or four branches. And so if you're a surgeon, you need to be viscerally aware of these sort of visceral changes. Okay, so it makes sense

then that there's still demand for these bodies. But how does the industry match the supply? Are people super keen to have their remains fainted over and butchered by medical

students? Yeah, well, surprisingly, quite a lot of people are quite keen. We get around 1,300, they call them donors. Anatomists are very careful to avoid the kind of words that probably I've been using in this. But there are loads of people who are really keen. 1,300 bodies are accepted every year in Britain, but not all the bodies that are donated can be accepted. So more than that are given, but they are rejected for various reasons. So if you're too tall, you're no good because you come off the end of a dissecting table. If you're too fat, you're no good because people can't lift you. So this is why the trade exists. So we import them. We have not enough. Some countries have a surplus and that's why we import ours from America. And

why does America have a surplus and we don't?