Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.

(Whatever Galen’s shortcomings as a comparative anatomist, the man is to be respected for his ingenuity, for procuring apes in ancient Rome can’t have been easy.)

Out behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center is a lovely, forested grove with squirrels leaping in the branches of hickory trees and birds calling and patches of green grass where people lie on their backs in the sun, or sometimes the shade, depending on where the researchers put them.

“You want a vivid description of what’s going through my brain as I’m cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines?”

Who decides when it’s okay to sacrifice human lives to save money? Ostensibly, the Federal Aviation Administration. The problem is that most airline safety improvements are assessed from a cost-benefit viewpoint. To quantify the “benefit” side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million. “That’s the economic value of the cost of somebody dying and the effects it has on society,” said Van Goudy, the FAA man I spoke with.