Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

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

Marilena replies that she doesn’t have a problem with heads. “For me, hands are hard.” She looks up from what she’s doing. “Because you’re holding this disconnected hand, and it’s holding you back.”

They are donated cadavers, helping, in their mute, fragrant way, to advance the science of criminal forensics.

For the more you know about how dead bodies decay—the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how the environment affects these phases—the better equipped you are to figure out when any given body died: in other words, the day and even the approximate time of day it was murdered.

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.