In 1998, Austria returned the corpse to Bolzano, which built a new museum for the corpse and the artifacts.
The press agency AFP headlined its story "Dr Death opens corpse museum", suggesting a macabre display of human remains.
And in place of shrivelled grey organs in jars of formalin as seen in medical museums, plastination allowed whole corpses to be presented, available for minute inspection by anyone who cared to have a look.
The Oxford of the series has been littered with some 80 corpses: divinity students, museum curators, various academics and, in the final case, a female friend of Morse.
As they joust with authorial research - about the divine proportion in nature and the possibility that the Mona Lisa is a painting of Leonardo himself in drag - a thug from the secretive Catholic organisation Opus Dei, under orders from a sinister bishop, is also trying to understand the meaning of the imaginative corpse in the museum.
At the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan (a bogus museum with a tomb but no corpse), a drunken female guide is crushed to discover that Hessler isn't a spy.
Over the years she has published on a variety of topics, from fashion photography to literary corpses to bereaved children to museum benches.
Lying among the missiles, tanks and war planes in the museum's main hall is the eviscerated corpse of what was once a car.
The museum denied the existence of any mammoth corpse; the story was a hoax.
The Rotterdam museum tried to obtain the remains of the beast, known as the "Cern weasel", but the highly efficient staff at the European particle physics laboratory had already disposed of the corpse.
