Mary Roach, “Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers”

  – e-book 

 

Read from February February 2^nd to 18^th 2021

My Rating : 

 The horizon of expectations induced by the title of Mary Roach’s book, Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is, without a doubt, fulfilled. In fact, the whole book is a very interesting and pretty original effort to encourage people to change their belief that cadavers are gruesome, eerie, disgusting or simply boring, by proving that they are in fact some sort of superheroes, working for the ‘betterment of humankind’, that is helping us to test, experiment and understand the human body: they were the first ‘victims’ of the guillotine, the first subjects of the new embalming techniques, the first passengers to wear a seat belt. Moreover, that there is nothing disrespectful in relating amusing stories about them, for a cadaver is not a person anymore, it is simply an object without much dignity left:

Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.

Therefore Mary Roach’s development of the theme will be at the same time historical and modern, scientific and anecdotic, with many stories, some funny, some intriguing, some disconcerting to sustain this approach. Here are a few that I picked, which amused and interested me equally.

•  about 300 B.C., Herophilus, the father of anatomy, was the first to be given permission to dissect human cadavers by King Ptolemy I of Egypt. In his scientific enthusiasm, he extended this practice to include live criminals;
• because Church had declared dissection illegal (with the exception, in Britain, of the executed murderers), medical students and medical schools were forced to become inventive and either buy amputated limbs (one for ‘37½ cents, to be exact; it happened in Rochester, New York, in 1831’) and corpses from the family members, or, for the most dedicated, dissect their own dead (like William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulatory system, did with his father and sister), or steal unclaimed corpses, or  even accept them instead of cash (like some Scottish schools). No wonder that the rich, afraid their bodies would be stolen after death bought ‘mortsafes’ (ironcages put in concrete either above the grave or around the coffin), or coffins with cast-iron corpse straps, or had "dead houses" built near churches (Scotland, again) ‘where a body could be left to decompose until its structures and organs had disintegrated to the point where they were of no use to anatomists’;
•  it was also Church’s fault J that anatomists were, in public opinion, worse than executioners ‘for dissection was thought of, literally, as a punishment worse than death’ being added to death sentence when the crime was considered worse: one could be (and was) hung for stealing a pig, but he would be hung AND dissected for killing a man (in the 18^th century Britain this punishment became an alternative to gibbetting – publicly suspending the corpse in a gibbet (iron cage) until it rots; in USA it was also used against duelists)
•   in twelfth-century Arabia, mellified men (from latin mel – honey), in other words, human remains steeped in honey, were sold as topical or oral medicine for various conditions such as palsy, vertigo, bruises;   

• Most physicians delivered the substance by eyedropper, or prescribed it as a sort of tincture, although in Li Shih-chen's day, for cases of "nightmare due to attack by devils," the unfortunate sufferer was treated by "quietly spitting into the face."

• the inventive medicine book Chinese Materia Medica, dating from 16^th century, had many remedies provided by human body: urine for diabetes (but procured from a public latrine, not one’s own), excrements (in liquid, ash, soup and roasted form) for epidemic fevers and children’s genital sores or even body parts (a finger, an eye, a breast) taken from a young relative to be cooked for a sick elder one (this remedy was still applied in China in early 20^th century). Oe remedy is still popular today: placenta, cooked and consumed by some European and American women in order to cure postpartum depression. It seems that there are at least half-dozen pregnancy Web sites encouraging this, one of them, Mothers 35 Plus site based in UK listing ‘"several sumptuous recipes," including roast placenta and dehydrated placenta’;
•   in fact, body residues or secretions or whatever have been used from the antiquity to our days. For example, saliva used by ancient Romans, Jews, and Chinese for blindness or animal bite; also in Rome, blood from killed gladiators was prescribed for epilepsy if taken warm (the epileptic would be also treated, in time, with ‘distilled human skull, dried human heart, bolus of human mummy, boy's urine, excrement of mouse, goose, and horse…, arsenic, strychnine, cod liver oil, and borax); in the 18^th century human excrements were used for anthrax and plague and in Germany and France blood from guillotined criminals was used to treat gout and dropsy; in the Middle Ages, ‘marrow and oil distilled from human bones were prescribed for rheumatism, and human urinary sediment was said to counteract bladder stones’;
• accidentally, some remedies worked, either because of the power of placebo or of some scientific explanation unknown at the time: the acid substance of the bile could cure a deafness caused by a buildup of earwax, "clear liquid feces" could lead to vomiting and counteract the poisoning by mushrooms ; the active natural antibiotic in human saliva could be good for dog bite, eye infection, and "fetid perspiration".

There are many other interesting stories in Mary Roach’s book that could change your perception about dying. At the end of the day, she assures us, ‘there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological—to bring it to the point of acceptance.’

So, instead of making plans about your burial, you better let the living dispose of your body as they see fit, given that you, like Elvis, had already left the building.