kella’s CBR-III Review #6: Stiff-The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

I had originally heard about this book in a Pajiba review a couple years ago, and had made a mental note to add it to my “must read” list.  When it was reviewed again during CBR-III, I put it on hold at the library.

Mary Roach spends 294 pages discussing human cadavers- their history, their uses, and the many ways to dispose of them.  At first glance, that might seem like a morbid and horrifying topic, but I found it fascinating.

I went to one of the only non-medical-school universities in Canada that had a cadaver lab for its anatomy students to use.  The semester before those classes, I was terrified of the experience; an experience that turned out to be one of the most fascinating and informative of my entire education.  Roach’s first chapter talks about cadavers in school labs, and I found it interesting to find that my experience was well represented in hers – the bizarre balance between having the highest respect for the donation that these individuals made to science, while trying to not think of them as people so that your emotions stayed in check.

While that was an aspect of a cadaver’s “life” that I was familiar with, I was fascinated to learn about their roles in testing firearms, vehicle safety, plane crash investigation, and use as fertilizer.  I had never thought about the historical implications of cadaver dissection, the practice of cannibalism in some cultures, and the ever evolving funeral business.

Roach is able to write about all these topics with both a sense of humour and a sensitivity to the fact that while you may be able to distance yourself from this random cold body, that cold body was once someone’s very warm loved one.  It’s a book that is definitely not for the squeamish, but I found it to be both highly informative and entertaining (not an easy combination to pull off!).

I know that what a person decides about the final resting place of their remains can be a highly personal decision, affected by many factors, and I was wondering if this book would change my mind about what I would want done with my body.  If anything, it reaffirmed my decision that if any part of my body can be used (either through organ donation, or through a whole-body donation to science/research), I would be honoured to be counted among those whose death was their last act of helping to better the lives of others.

Carolyn’s CBR-III Review #1 -Stiff

I love reading great books about uncommon and bizarre subjects, the weirder better. In this sense, author Mary Roach might be my literary soul mate. She’s a science writer who tackles subjects such as toilets that work in zero gravity and the weight of the human soul. In her book “Stiff-The Curious Life of Human Cadavers” Roach examines what really happens to the body that is donated to science. She watches as plastic surgeons practice face lifts on the decapitated heads, as med students practice on them, and how scientists use them as crash-test dummies to reduce the number of fatal car crashes. She observes in the operating room as surgeons harvest the organs of a “beating heart” cadaver; that is a cadaver that is technically alive in the sense that he was still breathing but was declared brain-dead.

Roach manages to write a book that is somehow both respectful and funny, from the first line of her book, “”The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back”.  But then she’ll examine the line between life and death, especially in the case of the beating heart cadaver. One of my favorite aspects of the book was the scientists that she interviewed. To my surprise, they all seemed to treat the corpses with respect, even as they struggled to imagine them as merely slabs of meat.

Some people may find parts of the book particularly stomach-churning (I decided to stop eating while she described scientists study the rate of decay in corpses) but it’s just an incredibly fascinating book that I would recommend to all the Cannonballers.