Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken.

For one thing, you were being operated on without anesthesia. (The first operations under ether didn’t take place until 1846.) Surgical patients in the late 1700s and early 1800s could feel every cut, stitch, and probing finger. They were often blindfolded—

the only people who checked themselves in at teaching hospitals were those too poor to pay for private surgery.

When you take a photograph of a patient for a medical journal, she points out, you have the patient sign a release. The dead can’t refuse to sign releases, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to. This is why cadavers in photographs in pathology and forensics journals have black bars over their eyes,

If you stole a pig, you were hanged. If you killed a man, you were hanged and then dissected.

Dissection as a sentencing option for murderers was mandated, in 1752 Britain,

This pleasant Knoxville hillside is a field research facility, the only one in the world dedicated to the study of human decay. The people lying in the sun are dead.

corpses lose about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them.

Anthropological Research Facility, as it is blandly and vaguely called, has buried bodies in shallow graves, encased them in concrete, left them in car trunks and manmade ponds, and wrapped them in plastic bags. Pretty much anything a killer might do to dispose of a dead body the researchers at UT have done also.

Arpad explains that one of the graduate students is studying the effects of clothing on the decay process. Normally, they are naked.

The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats.

Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer.