1950s - 1960s: Supply and Demand
In the 1960s attitudes toward body donation shifted significantly, aided by the Universal Anatomical Gift Act of 1968 which provided that "any person of sound mind and 18 years of age may give all or any part of his body for transplantation or other medical purposes." The medical school began receiving donations and gift requests in such numbers that they had to turn people away. In fact, the interest in body donation had grown to such a point that at the end of September 1964, Harry W. Savage, MD sent a memo to all department heads in the medical school to outline the procedure for donation. As he noted, "Frequently faculty members are contacted over weekends or late at night relative to the delivery of cadavers to the school" and should thus know how to respond.
During this time (in fact as early as the 1940s and stretching into the 1970s) the medical school also received a significant amount of correspondence from people who wished to sell a body to the medical school - either their own specifically, or inquiring more generally. Multiple responses in the record to such letters acknowledge that "although the impression is current that such arrangements are possible", it was neither legal nor desirable for the medical school to purchase bodies (1944).
Use of the Caduceus Cemetery for burial ceased around 1966 when, according to Harry W. Savage MD, the land was taken away "by the College authorities and the Hanover town authorities". A small site at Rennie Farm was used briefly for burials (the existence of this burial site is referenced in more recent coverage of issues related to ground contamination at Rennie Farm), but according to Dr. Savage was used for only one ceremony before "we again ran into trouble with the local authorities and it was necessary to disband the group [The Ancient and Honorable Secret Society of Sextons] since cremation is now used with burial in plots in the official Hanover (Dartmouth) cemetery." The first remains were interred in the Dartmouth cemetery in 1967 and remains that are not returned to family for burial continue to be interred there today.
