69 pages • 2 hours read
Mary RoachStiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Eat Me”
Cannibalism is the overarching topic of Chapter Ten. Roach finds references to cannibalism in the ancient text Chinese Materia Medica, a 1597 “compendium of medicinal plants and animals compiled by the great naturalist Li Shih-chen” (222). Included in the Chinese Materia Medica is a recipe for “mellified man,” which was an 12th-century Arabian confection made from cadavers. To make mellified man, men ages seventy to eighty volunteered their cadavers to be fermented in honey. This confection was largely believed to have medicinal and healing purposes (221). Roach also notes that mummified humans have long been thought to have healing powers, especially when ingested, which led to a fake mummy trade in ancient Alexandria.
Human byproducts, from toenails to blood, have been used by doctors throughout history, Roach explains. Of course, this medicine was not entirely authentic or helpful, and sometimes the patient was “better off ignoring the doctor’s prescription” to use human remains for their curative powers (224). Roach goes on to detail the medical use of human feces, “in liquid, ash, and soup forms—for everything from epidemic fevers to children’s sores” (225). Human blood and human fat were also long held to have healing powers, and executioners and body snatchers would harvest these items to sell.
There are only two ancient bodily cures, that Roach could find, still being used today: one is the use of cadaver blood for transfusions, and the other is the consumption of placenta by new mothers: “[t]he tradition [of a mother consuming placenta] is sufficiently mainstream to appear on a half-dozen pregnancy Web sites” (232). Outside of these two examples, even for medical purposes, cannibalism is a major taboo.
Roach then investigates if any of the “human Chinese Materia Medica preparations are still used in modern China” (233). After reading two questionable news articles on Chinese partaking in human cannibalism, Roach sets her sights on using first-person research to investigate these claims: “I didn’t know whether the reports were true, partially true, or instances of bald-faced Chinese-bashing” (234). One such claim was about a restaurant called the White Temple Restaurant. The story goes that White Temple sold dumplings made from the “nether regions” of cadavers, because one of the owners worked in a crematorium and had access to cadavers (238). Instances of modern-day “taste cannibalism,” or the practice of cannibalism not because of necessity or for medicinal reason, but simply because of a taste preference, are hard to find, according to Roach, so she travels to the Hainan Province of China, where the White Temple incident was said to take place. The story seemed like an urban myth to Roach, and when she went to Hainan, she indeed found the story to be false.
Doing her due diligence, Roach investigates if cannibalism, at any point in history, would have been a justifiable practice. Outside of taboo, it is simply cost-prohibitive to practice cannibalism: “[a]nthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics” (244), meaning it is cheaper to raise cows for consumption than it is to farm humans. As far as a nutritional analysis goes, anthropologist Stanley Garn “had worked out the lean/fat percentage of human flesh,” and estimates that “humans have more or less the same body composition as veal” (246). Roach concludes the chapter with a quote from Garn, saying that most of humans are “hardly worth eating” from a nutritional standpoint (246).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Out of the Fire, Into the Compost Bin”
Beyond donating your body for scientific research and traditional funeral arrangements, there are other options to dispose of one’s body after death. Roach outlines those alternative options, particularly focusing on human composting, in Chapter Eleven. For centuries, disposal of the body was incorporated into the ritual of funeral memorial proceedings. However, in modern times, the process of disposal and memorial are separated, which allows for other options related to disposal past traditional burial or cremation.
One such option is “tissue digestion,” which is a process developed by a retired professor of pathology and retired professor of biology that involves dissolving the body into a mostly liquid form: “[t]issue digestion relies on two key ingredients: water and an alkali better known as lye” (253). Roach wanted to see the process in action, but due to legal restrictions from the anatomical board she was only granted access to a tissue digestor for animals. The advantage for a funeral home owner, in regard to tissue digestion, is that it is more economical than cremation. The other advantage, in general, for tissue digestion is that it is more environmentally friendly.
Roach gives a brief history of cremation, in order to show how difficult it will be to move beyond traditional corpse-disposal options: “You have only to look at the story of cremation to appreciate that changing the way America disposes of its dead is a feat not easily accomplished” (258). In the beginning, cremation was presented as a hygienic alternative to burial, but in contemporary times, we know that cremation emits dangerous gases and other air emissions—there are, as Roach learns, more environmentally-friendly options. One such option, and the focus of the chapter, is human composting.
Human composting is largely the same process as organic composting, in which decaying organic material is transformed into fertilizer, save that with human composting, human remains are involved. It is arguably the most environmentally-sound option for disposing of human bodies, but again, Roach states, “it is difficult, as it is, to attach the requisite dignity to human composting” in the United States (274). In Sweden, however, where environmentalism is more mainstream, it may prove to be more socially acceptable. Roach profiles Susanne Wiigh-Masak, a Swedish ecologist and founder of a human composting company, still in the early stages of business, called Promessa. As a brand-new company, Wiigh-Masak is still in the process of securing funding and corporate backing in the funeral industry to make Promessa a viable business. Roach surmises that Wiigh-Masak may succeed in taking composting mainstream with Promessa, not only because it is more culturally-acceptable in Sweden, but also because “she realizes the importance of keeping respectful disposition distinct from waste disposal, of addressing the family’s need for a dignified end” (275). Wiigh-Masak can only make Promessa a mainstream alternative with strategic, careful pitching of her company to the public: “[i]t takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism, cremation, anatomical gift giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance” (276). Roach concludes by saying that she hopes Wiigh-Masak succeeds in taking her company to the mainstream because Roach is “all for choices, in death as in life” (277).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Remains of the Author”
In the final chapter of Stiff, Roach ruminates on what will be done with her own body, postmortem. It is tradition for anatomy professors to donate their bodies to science, and Roach relates to this impulse. She considers donating her bones to become a skeleton: “I liked the idea that when I was gone, my skeleton would live on in some sunny, boisterous anatomy classroom” (282). In pursuit of this option, she contacts the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, a facility that accepts bodies specifically for the purposes of harvesting bones. She ends up not signing up to submit her skeleton, and instead investigates the possibility of donating her brain, for the “dumb and narcissistic” reason that her brain would be on display at Harvard and used by students there. The reality of the Harvard Brain Bank, she discovers, is not so glamorous. The brain is dissected and spliced, and then stored in a morgue freezer.
Another option Roach researches is plastination, which is “the process of taking organic tissue—a rosebud, say, or a human head—and replacing the water in it with a liquid silicone polymer, turning the organism into a permanently preserved version of itself” (286). Plastination was developed by a German anatomist named Gunther von Hagens, who used the process in his controversial art exhibit, which featured whole-body plastinated bodies. Roach visits the University of Michigan Medical School to witness the plastination process in-action. Looking down into the tube into which the plastination occurs, Roach notes that the body below looks “peaceful” but that “being plastinated is more unsettling than the reality” (289). However, the process of plastination is cost prohibitive, so Roach continues on her quest for other options.
Roach feels that, in spite of the human impulse toward control, it is illogical to be too concerned over what happens with your body after death: “[h]ere’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try and control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control” (290). Roach thinks that those who live on, the survivors of the deceased, should have final say over what happens with the bodies of their loved ones. Roach recalls how her mother was distressed by her father’s final wish to be cremated, which went against Roach’s mother’s Catholic upbringing. When Roach saw her mother’s intense dismay, Roach formed her opinion that since the survivors are the people who need to deal with it, then they should select the final resting place for their loved ones that is least distressing for them.
Roach’s husband, Ed, is very squeamish about gore, so Roach surmises that he will not want to know the details of whatever happens to Roach’s body, if she is the one to die first. But Roach is sure of the fact that her body will be donated to science and, with her characteristic dark humor, Roach concludes the book by imagining medical students preparing to dissect her body:
I will include a biographical note in my file for the students who dissect me (you can do this), so they look down at my dilapidated hull and say, ‘Hey, check this. I got that woman who wrote a book about cadavers.’ And if there’s any way I can arrange it, I’ll make the thing wink (292).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Cultural norms, and how they affect our treatment of the dead, are explored more fully in these chapters. As Roach notes in Chapter Ten, the chapter on cannibalism, “we are all products of our upbringing, our culture, our need to conform” (236). The taboos surrounding death are created and enforced by cultural norms, which vary from country to country and can change over time. Roach quotes the famous painter, Diego Rivera, who wrote in his biography that if society were to embrace cannibalism (he dabbled, supposedly, in cannibalism), it would mean that society had shed all of its “irrational superstitions and taboos” (236). Violating these cultural norms, especially those surrounding the dead, can lead to ostracization, as Roach notes herself when she writes: “It’s all well and good to write an article about corpses, but a full-size book plants a red flag on your character” (14). There is a cultural norm against morbidity, and to not be overly obsessed with death, and Roach asserts Stiff violates this.
Once again, in these concluding chapters, Roach finds that, as with any discussion about the death, scientific questions often lead to spiritual ones. Roach looks at “hard-core ecologist” Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who Roach paints as having an almost religious fervor for saving the earth. Roach summarizes Wiigh-Masak’s belief in ecology as follows: “We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth” (263). The question of what becomes of us when we die, even for those who are not explicitly religious, nonetheless has a spiritual attachment to a concern greater than themselves.
The book ends on a personal note, reaffirming Roach’s commitment to scientific exploration and discovery, no matter how gory or disturbing. Knowing all that she knows about the processes of death, and having witnessed some of the more gruesome aspects of death in-person, this is a testament to the strength of her conviction, and also her belief that the work of cadaver research is deeply important.
