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I notice here that I used the possessive “my mother’s,” as if to say the cadaver that belonged to my mother, not the cadaver that was my mother. My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull. Or that was how it seemed to me.
From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers.
To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows.
At certain Scottish schools, in the 1700s, the arrangement was more formal: Tuition, writes Ruth Richardson, could be paid in corpses rather than cash.
Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. They are young flies. Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word “maggot.” Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use “hacienda.”
If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: “Rice Krispies.” Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.
I asked Mack what made the undertakers back off from their claims of eternal preservation. It was, as it so often is, a lawsuit. “One man took them up on it. He bought a space in a mausoleum and every six months he’d go in with his lunch and open up his mother’s casket and visit with her on his lunch hour. One especially wet spring, some moisture got in, and come to find, Mom had grown a beard. She was covered with mold. He sued, and collected twenty-five thousand dollars from the mortuary. So they’ve stopped making that statement.”
GM’s first collapsible steering wheel shaft, introduced in the early 1960s, cut the risk of death in a head-on collision by half.
In 1993, a research team at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine had the courage to attempt a series of impact studies on children—and the audacity to do it without consent.
A crash test dummy sits on a sled railing. Its upper body rests on its thighs, head on knees, as though collapsed in despair. It has no arms, perhaps the source of the despair.
The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it.
Gore you get used to. Shattered lives you don’t.
It’s like market-testing Kid Rock singles on a roomful of Perry Como fans.
The stethoscope wasn’t invented until the mid-1800s,
Take, for example, the condition known as “locked-in state.” In one form of the disease, the nerves, from eyeballs to toes, suddenly and rather swiftly drop out of commission, with the result that the body is completely paralyzed, while the mind remains normal. The patient can hear what’s being said but has no way of communicating that he’s still in there, and that no, it’s definitely not okay to give his organs away for transplant. In severe cases, even the muscles that contract to change the size of the pupils no longer function.
Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.
Is it a sensible use of medical resources to keep terminally ill and extravagantly wealthy people alive? Shouldn’t we, as a culture, encourage a saner, more accepting attitude toward death?
…In Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After a month he only excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey) and death follows. His fellow men place him in a stone coffin full of honey in which he macerates. The date is put upon the coffin giving the year and month. After a hundred years the seals are removed. A confection is formed which is used for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs. A small amount taken internally will immediately cure the complaint.
Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause” (I’m quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next). “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema (popular in France at the time Thompson was writing), gallstone for hiccoughs, tartar of human teeth for wasp bite,
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Since back before Hippocrates’ day, physicians had viewed the female reproductive system not as an organ but as an independent entity, a mysterious creature with a will of its own, prone to haphazard “wanderings.”
