Stiff: Adventures After Death

For most of us, death is the end of the line. After we die, most of us will have our bodies quietly and unremarkably disposed of—cremated or interred in a mausoleum or casket. As Mary Roach demonstrates in her new book, however, some bodies go on to do remarkable things. They help medical students learn anatomy and surgeons to practice their technique without risk to living patients. They help FAA investigators understand why a plane may have crashed. They help auto-makers design safety features that save thousands of lives each year. Perhaps most importantly, they offer the very ill a new chance at life by providing them with desperately-needed hearts, livers, and kidneys. The adventures of these remarkable bodies are the subject of this compelling new book, which explores in some detail the ways in which cadavers are put to use by doctors, scientists, and other researchers.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
W. W. Norton

At this point, some of you are probably asking, ‘Why would anyone want to read a book like that?’ (I leave it to Ms. Roach to address, as she does in her introduction, the question of why someone would want to write a book like that.) It is by its very nature an offputting subject, and there are certainly moments in this book that are (to put it mildly) pretty uncomfortable. It is certainly not a book for the squeamish or the faint of heart. It is, nevertheless, fascinating stuff. Let’s just say that I’ve always been a curious guy and leave it at that.

The anonymous cadavers that are the subjects of Stiff could hardly have found a more sympathetic chronicler than Mary Roach. Roach has managed to write a book that balances sensitivity and respect with a wonderfully sharp wit. In fact, Stiff is unexpectedly and quite blessedly hilarious, although the humor never comes at the expense at the dead bodies that populate its pages. Instead, Roach uses humor as a kind of psychic safety valve, a vital and much-appreciated tension release from what is, at times, some very intense subject matter.

Roughly half the book covers the use of cadavers in medical and scientific research. These chapters include visits to a medical school’s dissection lab, a university lab studying impact tolerances in car crashes, and a research facility in which forensic scientists seek to improve crime scene investigative techniques by studying bodies in varying states of decomposition (this one was the hardest for me to get through). Roach also attends a surgery in which organs are being recovered from a “beating heart” cadaver—a cadaver whose brain functions have long since ceased and whose body is being artificially kept “alive” until its organs can be removed. The procedure raises some powerful questions about the boundaries of life and death, and Roach provides a long account of the scientific, legal, and ethical attempts to define the concept of death that makes this one of the most fascinating chapters in the book.

Roach also turns her gaze on some of the less reputable uses that doctors and researchers have historically made of cadavers, many of which now seem to fall well outsides the bounds of both sanity and ethics. There’s the doctor, for instance, who in the 1930s crucified cadavers in an attempt to authenticate the Shroud of Turin. Roach also provides a droll and utterly hilarious history of body snatching, a short overview of medicinal cannibalism (human mummy confection, anyone?), and the spectacularly strange account of Dr. Robert White, a neurosurgeon who in the mid-1960s performed a series of operations that could be considered as the first head transplant (or full body transplant, depending on your point of view). I found these chapters to be among the most entertaining of the book, but keep in mind that this is coming from someone who enjoys reading books about cadavers.

This is obviously not a book that’s going to suit everyone’s taste, and although Roach handles her subject respectfully, I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has recently experienced the loss of a friend or loved one. Adventurous and curious readers, however, will likely find Stiff to be a wonderful and engrossing exploration of a subject most people are reluctant to talk about.

Published in Louisville Eccentric Observer