The University of Santa Teresa medical school is the final destination for some women whose deaths in Santa Teresa leave them unidentified or without anyone to claim them. Its brief appearances connect forensic procedure to a stark institutional consequence: a victim may be examined and entered into an official account, yet still pass from public notice into medical use without recovering her name.

Identification and Forensic Record

In the account of the January 1993 killing of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, police first take the body to a station, where a judge and officers examine and photograph it; the medical examiner then performs an autopsy at the city hospital. The examination establishes the cause of death, while the case’s identification is described separately as relatively easy. The sequence distinguishes the forensic record of a body from the work of identifying the person it belonged to.

Other cases preserve the limits of that record. A woman found in a field in June 1993 is estimated to have been between twenty-three and twenty-five, but her name is never learned; the medical examiner can give only a broad estimate of how long she has been dead and cannot determine the cause with certainty. In another case, the remains of an unidentified girl are examined and photographed, and investigators pursue a lead based on a ring bearing the name of an English academy. The inquiry produces no identification. These details show how evidence can be collected without resolving who the victim was.

Unclaimed Bodies and Medical Use

The clearest direct connection to the medical school comes through Sofia Serrano. After her death, two women eventually identify her and describe her work in maquiladoras, as a waitress, and most recently as a sex worker in vacant lots. Because she has no family in Santa Teresa, her body is handed over to the University of Santa Teresa medical school. Her case makes explicit that identification alone does not ensure a family claim or burial: her limited local ties determine what happens next.

The same outcome follows for an unidentified girl found at the new city dump in October 1994. Police investigate an identifying mark on her ring and publish her photograph, but neither step leads to recognition. Two weeks later, the body is sent to swell the supply of corpses for the medical school’s students. The narrative states the transfer plainly, placing an educational institution at the end of an unsuccessful search for identity.

Institutional Significance

Across these cases, the medical school is not described through its teaching or facilities; it enters the story through the disposition of dead women. The contrast is between detailed bodily evidence—autopsies, estimates, photographs, and distinguishing marks—and the persistent absence of names or claimants. Medical examination can establish facts about death, but it cannot by itself restore the social identity that the investigation has failed to recover.

That distinction sharpens the novel’s portrayal of institutional handling of the killings. Some women are named and recognized, while others remain unknown even after police and medical procedures have recorded details about them. When an unidentified or unclaimed body becomes material for student use, the administrative process continues, but the victim’s disappearance from ordinary social life is not undone. The school thus marks one endpoint in a chain that turns a death into evidence, and evidence into a body transferred beyond the possibility of personal recognition.