Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
By Mary Roach
W. W. Norton and Company April 2003
303 pages
From the lovely local library
Mary Roach set off on an investigation to find out about
alternate roles for human bodies. She interviewed scientists and went to
research facilities to find out how cadavers were used in the past, present, and
how they may be used in the future. Readers learn about the answers gained from
car crash tests and crashed airplanes. We find out about the bizarre
“medicines” that were crafted from body parts in early centuries. Roach
grapples with what she wants done with her own body, and considers alternate
practices, such as water reduction (where the body is reduced to about 2% of
its former weight) and human compost.
So this book seems like a strange choice. It can be a
conversation stopper to tell people you are reading a book about dead bodies. But
I’ve never been a squeamish person, and I had no cause for worry. While this
book is very informative, it is not gratuitous. I think if you can handle the
standard anatomy and physiology class, you should be all set.
Ms. Roach approaches the subject with both a sense of
respect and a very large sense of humor. She writes in the forward about her
own experience with losing her mother and remarks that, “This book is not about
death as in dying. Death, as in dying, is sad and profound. There is nothing
funny about losing someone you love, or about being the person about to be
lost. This book is about the already dead, the anonymous, the behind-the-scenes
dead.” This respect is carried throughout, regardless of the bizarre situations
in which Roach encounters the deceased.
The humor in these situations comes out of our bizarre cultural
willingness to deem some things as acceptable and others as not. “Off-putting
as cadaveric medicine may be, it is – like cultural differences in cuisine –
mainly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Treating rheumatism with bone
marrow or scrofula with sweat is scarcely more radical or ghoulish than
treating, say, dwarfism with human growth hormone. We see nothing distasteful
in injections of human blood, yet the thought of soaking in it makes us cringe.
I’m not advocating a return to medicinal earwax, but a little calm is in
order.”
If you want to read a non-fiction book that will teach
you new things and make you laugh out loud, Ms. Roach is your go-to writer.
Reading Stiff may make you reconsider
what you want to do with your own body…or it could just make that weird guy on
the train move a little farther away from you. You are parading around with a
book about dead bodies, after all.
