There is a brown box on a wooden coffee table. There is a person inside. Jon Ferry pulled a box cutter out of his jeans.
A skull's mandible is revealed by the thin aqua foam that is wrapped around it. The rest of the skull is put on the lid of a coffin next to a can of Red Bull by the man.
Ferry says the skull is likely Indian and has betel-nuts staining its teeth. It will be inspected, photographed and entered into a database before it is joined to the 80 skulls in a glass cabinet. Each has a baby-blue label with an accession number and the name of the company on it. The different angles of the sacrums of the five articulated skeletons are a reminder of the unique postures of the people they once belonged to.
The human bones are for sale. He began to develop his obsession when he was 13 years old. His father gave him a mouse skeleton that wasn't scary or weird, and that was the start of his passion for art. Ferry started JonsBones as a business after moving to New York. The owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities explained that the remnants of the medical osteology industry were what inspired him to become interested in human bones.
JonsBones now has eight employees, half a million followers and over 22 million likes on TikTok, where Ferry posts videos about his favourite topic. He addresses the questions of his followers. He explained in one video that medical students bought them from medical supply companies and then gestured towards a wooden box of bones. Students used to purchase their own skeletons for their studies.
Some users don't think that chicken comes from the grocery store.
It's hard to work with the public.
Ferry is looking at submissions on the day of my visit. A form on his website gives him about 30 a month. He inspects every photograph for signs, cuts, hardware, and then decides if he wants to acquire them if their owners don't live in Georgia, Tennessee or Louisiana, where laws limit the sale of human remains
Doctors-in-training used real skeletons to study the human body. The rapid expansion of the medical industry in the 19th century caused demand for bodies to outstrip supply. Those whose graves were robbed by body-snatchers came from the poor and prisoners.
The UK's Anatomy Act of 1832 limited body-snatching by allowing doctors to help themselves, as a result of Burke and Hare's side-line in murdering tenants of their Edinburgh boarding house.
Calcutta became the capital of the human bone trade due to a shortage of bodies. The imported bones were sold to Europe and America's medical students. The 1943 Bengal famine, which killed millions, made it easier to get skeletons from India.
Disasters tend to increase supply, as well as graveyard vandals, according to the Times of India. The trade brought in more than one million dollars to Calcutta. Sanker Sen, the owner of the company Reknas, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that they bought unclaimed bodies from morgues and would sell them to companies.
The bones would be wiped clean and turned into branded products. Ferry shows this by opening a skull and showing a Reknas label on it. 'You know Whole Foods?' The ferry said something. They call it Whole Foods after putting their label on it. In the bone industry, that happened as well.
India banned the trade of human remains in 1985 after a trader was arrested for exporting child skeletons.
When a doctor dies, the bones are often passed down to family members. Ferry is used to people finding skeletons in their closets. He facilitates their profitable re-entry into the medical teaching sphere, where he thinks they may still benefit humanity with their unique variations. He says that the bones are here, so we should use them.
Medical teaching institutions and search and rescue operations are the main buyers of Ferry. The bones are for sale on the JonsBones website for up to $7500 for an articulated skeleton and up to 69 dollars for a pelvis.
He believes that everyone has the right to look at bones.
Sam Redman is a history professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author.
Redman believes that medical osteology is an extension of the wider tradition since the remains of people who were marginalized were collected with such virulence that they ended up in the bone trade. He says there isn't an ethical way to sell human remains. There is a connection between the legacy of this and racism and scientific racism.
When talking to Ferry, he tries to draw a responsible framework for his operation. The other questionable things might be ok in contrast to the ones that aren't. He will sell bones online, but not on TikTok, because we don't know what the individual's last wishes were.
Ebay banned the sale of human remains in 2016 but you can still buy bones on social media, like the Bone Room in Berkeley, California. Ferry says the price of his first skull has gone up from about $500 to $800 to $2,000 to $3,000 in four years. He says that it has become more public.
One line he can't draw is if he's dealing with pieces or people. They should be treated with respect and dignity. We display these pieces with respect in the context of the collection. Reburial is not covered by the dignified treatment of a person's remains.
The value of human remains obscures the person they were. The problem is that we forget who the people were. Jon is on the wrong side of ethics when it comes to turning a human into a commodity.
Ferry would like to have a museum where anyone could see his historical collection and a gift shop in the future. The first jewellery line from JonsBones is made of sterling silver and has tiny skulls covering a ring. He doesn't mind the criticism if it facilitates a conversation.
He says he is doing this because he believes this is the best thing to do at the moment. We are doing our best to preserve these pieces for future generations.
He says that the day that he stops doing what he is doing is when there is a better solution.
There is a solution for many people. In the US, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act protects the cultural and biological remains of Native Americans. There is a path forward for the respectful return of other human remains if we know or are able to determine ancestry.
It would be hard to know where the medical bones came from. Most cultures have some form of funeral practice. There is a genuine benefit to the study of real human bones, so long as there are willed donation programmes, but can that benefit justify recycling the bones that have not been treated fairly?
As the generation of doctors who bought their bone boxes at the industry's height in the 1960s and 70s die, Ferry predicts there will be more skeletons in people's closets. As awareness grows, maybe some of them will be laid to rest.
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