So Gregor Mendel (yes, the guy with the pea plants) wrote down that he wanted to be given a thorough autopsy after he died.
The year he died was 1884. Autopsies were increasingly common at the time, but Mendel was an Augustinian friar and the arguments preventing donating your body to science for teaching autopsies, research, etc. were theological. The “ethical” source of teaching cadavers for doctors to autopsy was (in many places) the bodies of executed criminals, as a sort of post-mortem punishment.
Mendel became a monk specifically because he couldn’t afford to study otherwise, even after one of his sisters donated her dowry to the cause. He did too well as a monk to continue his work as long as he wanted: he got promoted to Abbott and the last sixteen years of his life were spent doing administrative work, and his experiments weren’t properly replicated, or examined as a viable alternative to then current theories on inheritance, until 1900. But he chose to donate his body to science (which he loved) and be of material benefit to the field of medicine, which he didn’t practice but two of his nephews did.
There’s just something beautiful about a guy who lived through the era where having your body dissected was the height of dishonor, in an institution that had advocated against the practice, deciding that anything that helps humanity as a whole was worth doing.
There’s something just as beautiful about the fact that he was exhumed for genetic sequencing on his 200th birthday - usually we don’t just dig people up and grab their genes as a surprise party, because in addition to it being a lot of work we can’t assume they would have appreciated it, but Mendel? He would have been jazzed.
Andreas and Neveah’s brothers didn’t get along, but she appreciated him trying to give it a shot. Frederico straight up didn’t like him, but Marcelo came around to him after Andreas impressed him with a game of chess.
For me, the thing is that "confusing" just... isn't the right descriptor for my experience reading the Locked Tomb books. I wasn't "confused," I just didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, and I was aware of that fact. I feel like I generally knew what I was meant to know, as a reader, at the point in the book where I was at. And for a very significant portion of the series, what the reader is meant to know is, "not much." I was less "confused" and moreso "searching for the explanation that will connect everything." This is absolutely a series on the very high end of the "unknown quantities" spectrum. They're an intellectual escape room.
But the shorthand way to convey that is just that yeah, no, these books are super confusing.