Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

This is a book about notable achievements made while dead. There are people long forgotten for their contributions while alive, but immortalized in the pages of books and journals.

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.

“Dissection,” writes historian Ruth Richardson in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, “requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being.”

live surgery is the worst place for a surgeon to be practicing a new skill.