Stiff – The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to you after you die (and to be honest, if you haven’t then you’re a bit odd) then Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach is the book with the answers you need.

Well, some of them.

Stiff examines quite specifically at what happens to your physical body once your soul/chi/sentience leaves it, at the various things that can happen to you and that have happened to the bodies of others throughout the history of  (although having read the book it may stretch standard definitions of the word) science.

Stiff is not a book about dying, it is much more about being dead – about the bits, the markers of yourself, you leave behind.

Although the subject matter may sound ghoulish, even macabre Mary Roach’s book manages with some ease to establish and maintain a light, humourous and conversational tone throughout.

I have on more than one occasion felt a little uneasy lugging this book around under public scrutiny or admitting to reading it for fear of being run out of town by massed wielders of pitchforks. I’ve briefly considered T-Shirts stylishly proclaiming “yes I’m reading about dead bodies, but it’s OK – I’m quite normal and actually the book is quite funny”.

It is precisely this strong sense of squeamish unease at which Mary Roach has taken aim in this fascinating and highly entertaining book. Her approach is light-hearted and her enthusiasm comes from a genuine (rather than morbid) curiosity. She is thus able to go to dark and scary places, witness stomach-turning sights and still retain sufficient wits to ask amusing or questions so blunt as to tread just the right side of rudeness.

Having said that, the book does begin quite alarmingly, at a working seminar where professional plastic surgeons have paid good money to hone their high-priced skills on the faces of dismembered heads, mounted on what look like baking trays. This book is not for the faint-hearted but does impart great reward to those who can get beyond the squeam or how are of more robust constitution.

Stiff goes on to cover amongst other things: the best way to theoretically survive an aeroplane crash (be male and sit near the exits), why crash-test dummies will always be inferior to testing “the real thing”, that prior to about 1920 doctors & physicians actually killed more people than they cured, what actually happened to Flight 800 and how they figured it out, the long and chequered history of how to tell if & when someone is actually dead, where the soul is thought to reside in the body, and and a look at why cremation may be bad for the environment and the possible alternatives.

One of the recurring issues in Stiff is that of willed donation – giving your body (whole or parts thereof) over to scientific research or medical emergency upon your demise. I personally found it interesting that while such details as with the plastic surgeons above are unlikely to have much positive impact on donation levels, the book should at least get some interesting conversations going – once you’ve got past the awkward stage of admitting that you’ve read it

So is the book then ultimately self-defeating? My inclination says not. Mary Roach does a fine job of both humanising the cadavers and of ennobling them; celebrating them for their selflessness and sacrifice.

It is hard to come out of reading the book feeling a little more sanguine relaxed about the prospect of at some point leaving your earthly shell. Stiff is a very hard book not to like.

There is a 30 min interview with Mary Roach conducted shortly after the publication of her latest book Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Sex and Science as part of the Authors @ Google series:

There is also a nice interview with Mary Roach about Stiff over at identytheory.com which I highly recommend.

It may be important to point out here that while a Google search for “Mary Roach” will turn up countless entries for this gifted author, any peep into the video results will reveal a completely different Mary Roach struggling hideously on American Idol. Evidently the name doth not the talent impart.

About the Author

Mary Roach’s journalistic writing has appeared in Salon, Wired, Outside, GQ, Discover, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine; her column, “My Planet,” appears monthly in Reader’s Digest. She lives in San Francisco.

Stiff – Table of Contents:

1. A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Practising surgery on the dead
2. Crimes of Anatomy: Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
3. Life After Death: On human decay and what can be done about it
4. Dead Man Driving: Human crash test dummies and the ghastly, necessary science of impact tolerance
5. Beyond the Black Box: When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash
6. The Cadaver Who Joined the Army: The sticky ethics of bullets and bombs
7. Holy Cadaver: The crucifixion experiments
8. How to Know if You’re Dead: Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul
9. Just a Head: Decapitation, reanimation, and the human head transplant
10. Eat Me: Medicinal cannibalism and the case of the human dumplings
11. Out of the Fire, into the Compost Bin: And other new ways to end up
12. Remains of the Author: Will she or won’t she?

Other published books by Mary Roach:

   

Tagged as: book review, mary roach, non-fiction, Reading Suggestions, science