Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

Death makes us helplessly polite.

whole-cadaver dissection is being phased out at some medical schools.

The potassium level of the gel inside the eyes is helpful during the first twenty-four hours, as is algor mortis—the cooling of a dead body; barring temperature extremes, corpses lose about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them.

TWA Flight 800.

Aerospace Pathology,

The frangible bullet was designed to solve the “overpenetration,” or ricochet, problem, i.e., bullets passing through victims, bouncing off walls, and harming bystanders or the police or soldiers who fired them.

Indeed, live, anesthetized animals have generally been considered preferable, as targets of explosions, to dead human beings.

Wtf is wrong with people that they would prefer aive animal be killed over a lifeless corpse

The main problem, at the moment, is cost. Each FSL—they aren’t reusable—costs around $5,000; the cost of a cadaver (to cover shipping, HIV and hepatitis C testing, cremation, etc.) is typically under $500.

There was for a time a trade in fake mummies being sold by Jews in Alexandria.

So common was this black market trade that pharmaceutical authorities like Pomet offered tips for prospective mummy shoppers: “Choose what is of a fine shining black, not full of bones and dirt, of good smell and which being burnt does not stink of pitch.”

According to the Chinese Materia Medica, diabetics were to be treated with “a cupful of urine from a public latrine.”

There is no question that tissue digestion makes good sense for disposing of dead animals. It destroys pathogens, and, more important, it destroys prions—including the ones that cause mad cow disease—which rendering cannot reliably do.

A mortuary digestor will be relatively inexpensive to buy (less than $100,000) and, as mentioned, a tenth as expensive to run. Digestors make especially good sense in rural areas whose populations are too small to keep a crematory furnace continuously active, which is the best way for it to be. (Firing it up and letting it cool all the way down and refiring it over and over damages the furnace lining;

Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America.

America’s first crematory was built in 1874, on the estate of Francis Julius LeMoyne, a retired physician, abolitionist, and champion of education.

Take the American doctor who put forth a plan to boost the dead’s utility by skinning them prior to cremation and making leather. Take the Italian professor who advocated burning cadaveric fat in streetlamps, speculating that the 250 people who died each day in New York would yield 30,600 pounds of fuel daily.

Exhibit Human: The Wonders Within”