Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Natural History, June, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Mary Roach W.W. Norton & Company, 2003; $23.95

Warning: Do not read Stiff lying down. First of all, it's a trifle unsettling to eyeball its dust jacket while supine; the toe-tagged soles on the cover make you feel as if you are the body lying in a morgue. Second, if you share your bed with a dozing partner, you may endanger your relationship by laughing yourself silly. In her own edgy way, Mary Roach is an extremely funny science writer.

Roach doesn't flinch when confronted with the no-longer-living, because she finds the macabre so frequently absurd. When she visits a face-lift workshop at a university medical school, for instance, she discovers that a disembodied human head is included in each participant's price of admission. Walking between the rabies, she confronts rows of these dissection specimens from donated cadavers, each heady arrayed in a roasting pan. It's a bit less unsettling, she thinks, to imagine the lab as a rubbermask factory, and the surgeons as sculptors--which, in a way, they are.

The absurdity of "cadaverology," you realize, lies in the mixture of the mundane and the bizarre one encounters in the world of corpses. Working with dead bodies, we all dimly acknowledge, has many practical uses--yet, like sausage-making, it's best not to know too much about how it's done. Roach gets a guided tour of the "body farm" at the University of Tennessee, where cadavers are set out to rot, and forensic scientists study them in varying states of putrefaction to learn how to determine the time of death. Near the end of the visit she learns that, after three weeks, a body's internal organs resemble chicken soup. "So," says her guide in all seriousness, "lunch?"

At a military medical research lab, other grisly scenes unfold: cadavers are dangled, marionette-like, over armed land mines to test the effectiveness of protective shoes. If the corpses were blocks of gelatin rather than formerly living muscle and blood, no one would give it a second thought. Roach, in fact, also witnesses ersatz thighs (made of gelatin) being shot full of holes to determine the stopping power of bullets, and learns that a "tweaked version of Knox dessert gelatin" is a good substitute for human flesh, though not vice versa.

A dense Latin tide, something like De cadaveribus male olentibus, ("on foul-smelling dead bodies"), for instance, might have suited Roach's book better. She crams it with stories from so many sources that it resembles a medieval traveler's tale, indiscriminately conflating fact and rumor. To her credit, though, Roach has tracked many a weird tale to its source. She interviews the neurosurgeon Robert White, for instance, who experimented with keeping the isolated brains of dogs and monkeys alive inside other animals by hooking them up to the circulatory system. (The idea, as I understand it, is that people with terminal illnesses might have their heads swapped with those of brain-dead patients--effectively providing a whole-body transplant to needy multimillionaires.) She travels to Sweden to visit a company that markets a high-tech body composter as an alternative to crematoriums. (I imagined dinner at a friend's organic farm: "My late husband's in the tomatoes and the spinach. I hope you find him tasty.")

And in one of the most hilarious scenes in the book, the intrepid investigator flies to the Chinese island of Hainan to verify a 1991 Reuters article. Two brothers, according to the wire service, had been caught stealing the buttocks and thighs of cadavers awaiting cremation and turning them into "Sichuan-style dumplings," a popular mainstay of the local White Temple Restaurant. Roach later discovers that the whole story is a hoax--neither the brothers nor the restaurant exists--but not before she confronts the six-foot-tall director of a local crematorium, where one of the brothers allegedly worked, and is treated to a ten-minute harangue.

That some of Roach's stories are the stuff of urban legend comes as no surprise. That many of them are true, however, is what makes the guilty pleasure of reading her "book of the dead" so worthwhile.