Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

Hector Berlioz, in an 1822 entry in his Memoirs, shedding considerable light on his decision to pursue music rather than medicine: Robert…took me for the first time to the dissecting room…. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house—fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae—such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels.

The hallmark of fresh-stage decay is a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Human cells use enzymes to cleave molecules, breaking compounds down into things they can use.

It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.

Dead people, unembalmed ones anyway, basically dissolve; they collapse and sink in upon themselves and eventually seep out onto the ground. Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz? (“I’m melting!”) Putrefaction is more or less a slowed-down version of this.

Until recently, the process was known among transplant professionals as an “organ harvest,” which had a joyous, celebratory ring to it, perhaps a little too joyous, as it has been of late replaced by the more businesslike “organ recovery.”