One of the leading children”s hospitals in Britain illegally harvested hearts, brains, eyes and other organs from thousands of dead children without the consent of their parents, according to a government report published yesterday.
The report blamed a rogue pathologist at Alder Hey Children”s Hospital in Liverpool for systematically removing “every organ from every child who had a post-mortem” between 1988 and 1995.
But investigators also found stockpiled body parts, including the head of an 11-year-old boy, at the hospital and a Liverpool University research center that predated the term of Dutch pathologist Dick van Velzen. And a separate organ census issued by the Health Department yesterday indicated that removing body parts without “informed consent” is common in English hospitals.