“A hospice in Thailand offers morbid sightseers access to its AIDS patients — dead and alive — for a fee… You’d expect to find the dead bodies at the back of the hospital, not in the reception… Each naked corpse is laid out either on a concrete slab or pickled in a tank of greenish formaldehyde. Plinths hold index cards detailing the names and ages of each victim, and more pointedly how they had contracted HIV… all of the bodies had been donated by their owners in the interests of medical science — namely shocking those who would gaze upon them after their deaths… In a nearby anteroom, the shock tactics continue. Hundreds of Hessian sacks are heaped in a pile labelled ‘The Bone Hill.’ It is the final resting place of ground-down AIDS victims neither destined for reception-hall stardom nor claimed by their grieving or indifferent families.” — GreatReporter.com (UK)

The ironic part about inviting sightseers into an AIDS hospice is that — at least in Thailand and probably elsewhere too — the people most likely to visit it are the ones least likely to need the shock therapy. Why would drug addicts or prostitutes lolligag through the dead-end ward? They know they might be there soon enough. They have no use for the place. They prefer to remain in denial. Meanwhile, locals steer Westerners to the hospice and induce them to make a “charitable contribution,” significant portions of which go everywhere but the hospice itself.

If you really want to scare people straight, you have to pile up the dead bodies in a place where those most at risk will see them. One local claimed, though the writer of the article didn’t believe it, that a series of statues at the hospice were molded from ground-up bones, and it’s hard not to feel that that is exactly what they ought to do with them: create human scarecrows, which would then be posted, like any scarecrow, in the places most frequented by those at risk. Or if that didn’t work, if dumping a sack of bone dust on the doorstep of a needle user doesn’t prevent him from shooting up, then perhaps the smart thing would be to put out the bodies themselves. Donate a cadaver or two to every brothel in the region. That would give the horny man pause. There you are, ogling the teen hookers, when all of a sudden you see a big fish tank with green water. But what’s that big weird fish? My God! It’s a man — a dead man. You see a little placard affixed to the tank: so-and-so, died of AIDS, age 23, etc. “Yikes! I’m getting out of here, me!”

Of course, it becomes a vicious circle, because then no one visits prostitutes anymore, the girls and their families all starve to death, and though you could probably make money putting their dead bodies on display, there’s no moral to it anymore. (What would the moral be? Don’t starve yourself to death?) Instead you just have pure morbid spectacle, death and the people who pay to gape at it — which sounds rather like horror cinema, except that it’s real.

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