Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one. The dead of science are always strangers.*

The problem with cadavers is that they look so much like people. It’s the reason most of us prefer a pork chop to a slice of whole suckling pig. It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.”

The heads look like rubber Halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner.

(What she perhaps didn’t realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body’s erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)

Some anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class. At certain Scottish schools, in the 1700s, the arrangement was more formal: Tuition, writes Ruth Richardson, could be paid in corpses rather than cash.

omg nah

Cooper was an outspoken defender of human dissection. “He must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead” was his famous line.

He used to lay the bodies on their stomachs so he didn’t have to see their faces.

I ask him how he copes with the unpleasantnesses of dealing with dead strangers’ bodies and secretions. Like Arpad Vass, he says that he tries to focus on the positives. “If there are parasites or the person has dirty teeth or they didn’t wipe their nose before they died, you’re improving the situation, making them more presentable.”

He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I’ve been to frat parties like that.

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. 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.

known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human leg has no face, no eyes, no hands that once held babies or stroked a lover’s cheek.

If willed body program coordinators contacted the families of LEAP cadavers, would they then have to contact the families of the leg-drop-test cadavers down the hall, or, for that matter, the anatomy lab cadavers across campus? As Harris points out, the difference between a blast test and an anatomy class dissection is essentially the time span. One lasts a fraction of a second; the other lasts a year. “In the end,” he says. “they look pretty much the same.”

Others were segregated by class, with the well-to-do deceased paying extra to rot in luxury surroundings.

it would seem that when men believe their new hearts came from another man, they often believe this man to have been a stud and that some measure of this studliness has somehow been imparted to them. Nurses on transplant wards often remark that male transplant patients show a renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear “something other than that shapeless scrub so he could see her breasts.” A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection.

by far its most common use was as a treatment for contusions and preventing coagulation of blood: People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises.

Treating rheumatism with bone marrow or scrofula with sweat is scarcely more radical or ghoulish than treating, say, dwarfism with human growth hormone.

describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir.

The article stated that private and state-run clinics and hospitals in Shenzhen, outside Hong Kong, sold or gave away aborted fetuses as a treatment for skin problems and asthma and as a general health tonic.

Rivera—if we are to believe his anatomy lab tale—considered the legs, breasts, and breaded ribs of the female cadavers “delicacies,” and especially relished “women’s brains in vinaigrette.”

“The little people of the world,” said Garn—and I had to assume he was referring to the malnourished denizens of the third world and not dwarfs—“are hardly worth eating.”