Nearly 500,000 people follow Nicole Angemi on Instagram as she posts images of decaying limbs, car accident injuries and bullet holes in murder victims.

Most of the images were published on Angemi’s social media account without the permission of the deceased relatives and this has infuriated the public.

Angemi works for a hospital in New Jersey, and explains that the images are not meant to offend, just to educate. However her decision to expose the faces of her victims has been labelled as exploitation of the dead.

One person wrote online: “I’m all about bringing science to the public, but if I scrolled across a photo of my father’s autopsy on your Instagram, or if my children scrolled across their mother’s dead body, you better believe lawyers will be coming out.”

Nicole Angemi’s reaction to the immense amount of pressure to take down the photos was to say “If someone wants to see what an autopsy looks like, why can’t they have access to that?”

As author Mary Roach puts it, “We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget”. Perhaps Nicole Angemi’s reasoning behind the photos were legitimate, but her approach was too visceral for people to bare.