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Roach examines lives of human cadavers

Written by DeadGirl
Sunday, 12 September 2004
By Abby Foster DAILY Staff Writer Mary Roach explores life after death, in the corporeal sense at any rate, in her book, "Stiff," now in paperback. "Stiff" chronicles the bizarre, macabre and often ridiculous lives of cadavers that people donate to science. Some of the cadavers' activities are what one would expect Ã¢â‚¬â€ medical school anatomy labs Ã¢â‚¬â€ but most of Roach's examples are unexpected. Researchers use cadavers to test car safety in crashes, since crash test dummies don't get hurt like real people do. Cadaver research contributed glass windshields with more give to them than original window glass, among other things. Early windshields shattered in drivers' faces when cars crashed. Slamming cadavers with different types of tempered glass showed researchers which ones cause the least injury, making for safer vehicles. Plastic surgeons use disembodied heads to practice face lifts, and forensic scientists leave whole bodies out in the elements to study decay so that police officers can find out how long a body has been dead when they find it. The military uses cadavers to test the efficacy of new guns and bullets to make sure they're using weapons that can incapacitate their enemies. Roach's book is both sidesplitting and horrifying, which together make it completely fascinating. The cadavers are lifeless, which moves Roach's focus to the people who work with them. By way of example, the University of Tennessee Medical Center has the only lab in the world that studies the mechanisms of human decay. There's a hill on the campus in Knoxville where corpses lie on their backs, decaying, and scientists study what changes happen to the corpses over time. Roach visits the hill and the bodies with Arpad Vass, a researcher studying chemical breakdown in dead tissues, and Ron Walli, a media relations representative at the university. Vass points out the stages of decay to Roach, as Walli staves off nausea. The hillside, Roach explains, smells of decaying flesh. "The smell just stays with you," Walli tells Roach. "Or that's what you imagine. I must have washed my hands and face 20 times after I got back from my first time out here." Vass shows Roach maggots eating subcutaneous fat on a dead man. "It's kind of beautiful, this man's skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things," Roach editorializes. That's the charming thing about "Stiff." It's as much about people's perceptions of cadavers and reactions to them as it is about the actual cadavers themselves. Researchers and students working with cadavers are respectful and detached. Roach cleverly allows for a sense of the ridiculous, without seeming disrespectful to the dead. After all, they are dead. They can't hold themselves up. Vass explains that the bacteria digesting a cadaver from the inside actually can cause flatulence. It's an interesting read. I learned that humans have the same meat composition as veal. http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/books/040912/book1.shtml

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

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Have you decided on eternal repose?

	earthen burial
	entombment
	cremation
	donation to science
	cyrogenically frozen
	you mean I'm still alive?

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau, 1854