AHHHH, IM MELTTTTTINNGGGG!!!

STIFF - BY: MARY ROACH (Precis of pg.1 - 86)

Why bury/cremate your body when you can donate it to science, fostering advances in science and saving lives. This book is about achievements made with dead bodies; I've seen many cadavers to create this book, the first being my mothers in an open casket all made-up. I attended an anatomy class for plastic surgeon practice at UCSF. Doctors/students objectify the cadavers to ease the dissecting. All the head kinds vary sitting there in meat roasting pans, I think of them as masks. Before, cadavers were hard to come by and going under surgery had a 50% mortality rate, with no anesthesia. Surgery had a cabaret atmosphere, it boiled down to the poor donating their bodies, there were no consent forms and surgeons would do as they please. There was no respect for cadavers. Yearly at UCSF the anatomy division conducts a memorial service for all the cadavers used. Previously dissection was degree hire for criminal punishment. In the 1700’s anatomy schools began digging up cadavers, they equaled tuition. Anatomist would hire people to dig up bodies, thus came the famous case of Knox who received bodies from Burke & Hare who murder the bodies, and then delivered them fresh. Burke & Knox were both hung and Knox’s skeleton still remains in a museum today. In ancient Rome & Greece they were against human dissection, thus knew very little. In Columbia there was a case where the police were murdering the street urchins to sell their cadavers. I also went to a university where they study the decomposition of bodies under certain variables to aid in criminal justice. There are multiple phases of discomposure, maggots eat at the openings of the body, the bacteria within you eats you, resulting in gas that cannot escape, which swells bacteria rich areas eventually, exploding. There are beetles that eat your muscles as well as maggots and slowly your body melts into the ground. Next I visited a morgue where they embalm cadavers. In the 1600’s Dutch men found a way to embalm bodies because of the shortage of cadavers available for dissection. Embalming really grew during the civil war when the Army had 35,000 cadavers many needing to be transported to their families. Lincoln was then embalmed and brought around America, and it became a fad. Eventually the people warmed up to dissection because of the scientific advances.

• “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” (PG. 83-84)

• “Where before they had been grains of rice, here they are cooked rice . . . They live like rice too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. 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. (PG. 68)

• Vesalius “ jackdaws aloft in their high chair, with egregious arrogance croaking things they have never investigated but merely committed to memory from the books of others. Thus everything is wrongly taught . . . . and days are wasted in ridiculous question.” (PG. 54)


It fascinates me that when we decompose what allows us to survive, then eats us. To me that’s super freaky but also so amazing. What the anatomist Vesalius once stated holds so true to me in relation to how our society survives and how we are taught in school. Most schools are simply taught through textbook and even alternative schools such as SOF that use different mediums we hardly learn through experience. Thus we cannot do much without a book, and simply are filled with information we do not have the chance to absorb and explore to find our own conclusions. I find the progression from where bodies being dissected was a criminal punishment very eye opening; how our religious views have changed as a result to science. From the belief that our whole body went up to heaven, now it simply being the spirit. It is as though the beliefs have changed to satisfy the comfort of the believers. Human parts being used for soap and such also intrigue me. I don’t see why this is more twisted than doing the same with any other mammal. I love Roach’s writing style, her descriptions are so vivid.