Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

The Story: The title kind of says it all.  The author went on this big journey to find out what happened to bodies that were donated to science.  She had kind of figured (and I had to) that most of them ended up in jars of formaldehyde or as those skeletons that hang in classes, or something like that.  In fact, most of them are cut open by students in gross anatomy labs… but the other ones? Wow.

There are cadavers that help test non-lethel weapons, that test boots for walking in land-mine fields, ones that get banged up in a million different car accident scenarios, and I could go on and on and on.  There was one chapter about a school that just kind of lays cadavers around in various states of dress, in different amounts of sunlight, under different amounts of earth, all to test how bodies decompose in these situations to better help investigators determine a time of death.

Toward the end, the author kind of departs from this and starts talking about crazy practices doctors had way back when, and really fun experiments that they did.  My favorite example is a group of doctors who got into head transplants.  They started on dogs. They would take a puppy head and sew it on to a full grown dog body.  I have no idea why they didn’t put it on a puppy body or use a full grown dog head. That’s just not their thing I guess. They were nuts.

What I Thought: I know that I am morbid and sick.  I thought that this book was seriously fascinating.  My brother-in-law works at a tissue bank, so I had heard quite a bit about happens to your body if you are an organ donor, but had no idea about this whole side of things.

I thought that the author did a good job, right off of the bat, of separating the person who died and their body.  This was important because after that she showed us bodies getting maimed in pretty crazy ways.  She had a funny little quips about different parts of this process but always came back to the respect that everyone involved had for the body.  At one school they even have a memorial service for the bodies that they use in their anatomy labs.  She attended this and came away really touched.

The downside for me was the last few chapters. I think that she just needed filler to make her book “book length” so she just started going on and on about random stuff.  Overall I still liked the book because I was enamored with the first part, but I do think that those last few chapters could have been left out and the book would have been better overall.

This is our book club book this month and I think that discussing this book with a bunch of women will be pretty awesome.  I know I’ll come off looking like I love blood and guts and I’ll be put on some criminal watch list.  Ah well.

Conclusion: If you have recently lost someone near and dear or if you just have a weak stomach, I’d say skip this one.  It is a really good book, but not worth it if it’s going to make you cry or throw up.