Doctor keeps body frozen

Press, 31 July 1984, Page 29

Doctor keeps body frozen

NZPA-Reuter Neuil-Sur-Layon A French gynaecologist, aged 62, who has. kept his dead wife’s body in a freezer for several months, is not breaking the law, the public prosecutor’s office has ruled.

Jean-Louis Martineau, aged 62, decided to freeze the body of his wife, Monique, aged 49, after she died earlier this year, in the .expectation that future enable her to be brought

back to life. Mr Martineau had the body placed in a specially built freezer in the cellar of an uninhabited chateau he owns, where it is regularly visited by a woman responsible for checking the temperature and electrical supply. This unorthodox method of burial has angered officials in the Anjou region where the doctor lives. They are pressing Mr Martineau to have hia wife buried, cremated, or ar least

transferred from French soil to the United States, where the deep-freezing of bodies is more common. Local authorities asked the public prosecutor’s office for a ruling. The office said that the crypt containing the freezer at the family chateau in Anjou, Western France, could be considered a legal burial place. Although scientists have succeeded in preserving human eggs, sperm and embryos at low temperatures, freezing bodies appears

merely to prevent them from decomposing. Professor Pierre Douzou of the Natural History Museum in Paris said, “with our present knowledge, it seems completely utopian to imagine one could resuscitate dead bodies at some future moment” Residents of the doctor’s home town of Neuil-Sur-Layon do not seem much concerned by what goes on in .the chateau cellar. The ge&ral view is that he is “a gdOT chap, if a bit odd.”