Pages:
303
Original
date of publication: 2003
My
edition: 2003 (Norton)
Why
I decided to read: saw the author speak at a conference
How
I acquired my copy: Denver airport, October 2012
I
saw Mary Roach speak at the annual meeting of the American Medical Writers
Association in Sacramento at the beginning of October, where she was presented
with an award at a luncheon I attended. Her talk was so humorous and
interesting that on my way home I was able to find copies of her books in a
(gasp!) real bookstore in the Denver airport (I saw Flaubert lurking behind the
counter along with Jane Eyre).
For
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach harangued everyone from
morticians to doctors to body farm personnel others whose work brings them in
proximity to cadavers. In this book we see how cadavers are used for everything
from medical student anatomy lessons to crash test dummies (the impact that
cars have on cadavers is more realistic than if they were to use crash dummies
such as you see on TV) to forensic pathology research. Roach even went out of
her way to investigate a rumor she heard about two brothers in China who served
the buttocks of human cadavers as “Sichuan-style dumplings” to restaurant
customers.
Mary
Roach tells these stories with a mixture of fascination and humor, and even irreverence
at times. She’s certainly not squeamish, either in the dissection lab or
walking through a body farm. She often goes off on to personal tangents about
what one thing might remind her of, etc., which adds humor to her narrative.
She’s not a scientist by any means, but I really enjoyed this entertaining book.
One of the times that you have to do when working with the dead it to condition
yourself not to think about it in a morbid sense, which is why Roach uses humor
to mask feeling.
I
do wish, though, that Roach had talked a little bit more about the legal and
ethical issues that lie behind using a cadaver for human subjects research—I’ve
never seen it as an issue, but people seem to get awfully worked up about what
happens to their loved ones after they’ve died. What about issues such as
consent? Although it might have been outside the parameters of the book, it
would have been interesting if the author had touched on the subject as little
bit more. But other than that, I really enjoyed this book (and it got me some
odd stares at the cover of the book as I was reading it in Starbucks one
morning).
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