In this paper, I argue that the Catholic Church and Western medicine assumed historically significant roles in the use and circulation of human remains and, in so doing, established distinct traditions of dissection, preservation, and display. Furthermore, both institutions still maintain an essential role in making human remains ever more popular and culturally acceptable. The Church and Western medicine uphold various means of interaction that effectively keep the dead undisposed for specific purposes: as forms of cultural capital, objects of veneration, and fetishized, or aestheticized diversion. As such, the institutionalized dead have come to inhabit very particular spaces where they are made to perform a variety of duties for the living.Two seemingly opposed institutions in Western society have each contributed to the use of human remains as material culture. These institutions are the Roman Catholic Church, with its rich tradition of making and displaying relics, and the field of medicine in its creation and promotion of anatomical specimens. Both establishments, sanctioned by and representing powerful forms of authority, have been processing and displaying the dead human body over as many centuries as they have been active. But rather than representing two separate and distinct philosophies with respect to the human body, the Catholic Church and Western medicine have each promoted and established a very similar type of commodification and commercial aesthetic of the cadaver. Both have also created forms of spatial agency around the dismemberment Correspondence to: Myriam Nafte, Anthropology, McMaster University,