It was 1998, I was taking biology tutions from a guy who had just cracked the medical entrance exams the previous year and was doing his MBBS.
He told me about a gruesome incident he had encountered in the autopsy class. The senior surgeon taking the class had a homeless person anaesthetised and put up on the operating table, who had been admitted to the medical college two days back by a passerby. He was a chronic alcoholic and was suffering from a severe case of liver cirrhosis. The doctors presumed he wouldn't last through the night and any operative procedure would just be a waste of time and money!
So the guy told me, the senior surgeon just cut him open and removed his liver in broad view of all the students. They just left him like that on the table and the man died under an hour!!
I had no reason to disbelieve the person who told me this and this one incident was enough to make me want to choose an alternate career.

in the book
Stiff
here is a chapter early on that relates to something along the lines of the AAA society.

They used the Bodyworlds exhibition corpses in the actual movie as it happens
With regards to how the inspiration came don't really have an input on that more than to say thanks, it's made me even more reluctant at going under the knife!
If anyone knows where I could get a hold of "Evolution's Child" (1999), please msg me!

The Bodyworlds exhibit was here in San Francisco too. They had drip pans underneath some of the bodies because the body fat sometimes oozed out when it got warmgross!

I saw the Bodyworlds exhibit in Los Angeles maybe 3-4 years ago.
Amazing.

Are you a bug Bill Murray?

I've never heard of anything like it but it doesn't mean something like it never existed. After all, if it's a true secret society, that means no one else knows about it.
But I'm wondering if the inspiration for the movie might have been the popular exhibits of plasticized corpses like Gunther von Hagen's Bodyworlds. Real-life corpses are preserved with some type of clear plastic and displayed in action poses with the skin removed. Another group also organized a similar exhibit. These shows have appeared in museums and science centers around the world, but not without some controversy. You can actually see some of the exhibit in the last James Bond movie, "Casino Royale". When Bond goes to Miami, he chases one of the villains in the Bodyworlds exhibit.
I can easily see the writer of this movie seeing an ad for Bodyworlds in the paper or a news article, and then taking off with the idea and coming up with a movie like "Anatomie".