Cleveland Clinic rejects donated body as too obese for anatomy class

The Cleveland Clinic and obesity really don’t mix.

In recent years, the renowned health system has drawn attention for pushing deep fryers, sugary sodas and trans fats off its main campus, and for CEO Toby Cosgrove’s controversial comments that American society “protects” overweight people instead of giving them a “social stigma.”

Now, the Clinic has rejected a 6-foot-1, 350-pound corpse as being simply too big for its body donation program, which provides specimens for anatomy classes, MSNBC reports.

“Someone that’s shorter and carrying a lot of weight, that is a problem,” said Richard Drake, director of anatomy and a professor of surgery. “The storage is one issue, but when you are obese, there’s a lot of tissue everywhere. The students don’t get as good a learning opportunity.”

The good news is that the deceased man’s family took it well. “They understood that because, actually, they had tried a few other places,” Drake told MSNBC. “They were sort of checking around.”

Sadly, the situation the Clinic faced isn’t all that uncommon. Officials with body donation programs similar to the Clinic’s reported that they, too, have turned down corpses that were too large to study.

When it comes to body donations, weight and height limits are an unavoidable part of the process.