Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul are the main topics in Chapter Eight, which opens with a beating-heart cadaver referred to as “H” being wheeled into the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. H is braindead, but her body is being kept alive so that her organs can be harvested. Roach states that “H doesn’t look or smell or feel dead,” which is startling to Roach because in the next four hours H will have her liver, kidneys, and heart removed from her body (168). Roach describes the process of organ harvesting, as Roach is in the room with H as the doctors perform the surgery. The doctors “unzip her [H] like a parka” (169). Roach is again taken aback by how alive H looks, despite being medically and legally dead: “It is strange, almost impossible, really, to think of her as a corpse” (169).

Roach notes the “confusion people feel over beating-heart cadavers reflects centuries of confusion over how, exactly, to define death, to pinpoint the precise moment when the spirit—the soul, the chi, whatever you wish to call it—has ceased to exist and all that remains is a corpse” (170). Roach gives a sweeping history of the scientific and medical community’s attempts to prove the soul exists, spanning from ancient Egyptians to Thomas Edison in the 1800s. Fear of live burial was pervasive, so putrefaction was the “only reliable way to verify that someone was dead” during the 1800s, especially in Germany, where special buildings called “waiting mortuaries” were built for the purpose of housing the dead (172). Virtually no bodies were revived in these “waiting mortuaries,” and so their use was discontinued.

Death, historically, was not a simple matter of scientific observation. However, in 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts sought to determine the weight of the soul, and developed a series of tests to do so. The idea was that, if the soul could be weighed, death could be ascertained by a simple test of weight. Dr. MacDougall ultimately ascertained, with questionable science, that the soul weighed approximately three-fourths of an ounce (173). Beyond Dr. MacDougall, other early 20th-century scientists sought to make scientific claims about the soul. Extending even further back in history is the debate of where the soul resided in the body. Babylonians thought the soul resided in the liver; Egyptians thought it resided in the heart; in classical Greece, they engaged in debate about whether the soul was in the heart or the brain. Early anatomists conducted dissection experiments in attempt to find the soul, and Roach profiles a few of these early anatomists, including Realdo Colombo and William Harvey. Eventually, the heart is the primary determining factor over whether a person is living or dead, which has implications for the soul as well: “[p]lacing the heart center stage in our definition of death served to give it, by proxy, a starring role in our definition of life and the soul, or spirit or self” (175). This explains why the beating-heart cadaver is a “philosophical curveball” and “the notion of heart as fuel pump took some getting used to” (175).

Returning to H, Roach contemplates her organs. Roach notes that the beating heart moves far more than she anticipated: “[t]he thing is going wild in there. It’s a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price is Right” (179). When H’s heart is removed from her body, Roach says that that moment—when the heart is separated from the owner’s body—is the moment “when OR staff have been known to report sensing a ‘presence’ or ‘spirit’ in the room” (179).Roach explores modern-day understanding of where the soul resides and when it leaves the body. She interviews Mehmet Oz, a New York heart transplant surgeon, about his thoughts on this.

Roach gives a brief overview on medical philosophy that tried to “pin down the location and properties of a soul,” from 18th century Scottish physician Robert Whytt (who was “particularly obsessed” with the issue of why the heart continues beating after it’s cut from the body), to Eastern concepts of chi, to Thomas Edison’s concept of “life units” (181).

The modern medical community is “quite unequivocal about the brain being the seat of the soul, the chief commander of life and death” (186). The legal community, however, did not embrace braindeath as equivalent to death until later:“It wasn’t until 1974 that the law began to catch up. What forced the issue was a bizarre murder trial in Oakland, California,” in which the defense attorney of Andrew Lyons, a man who shot another man in the head in 1973 (leaving the victim braindead), argued that the prosecutor could not prove the man was dead when his organs were harvested (187).

“Like the specter of live burial that plagued the French and German citizenry in the 1800s, the fear of live organ harvesting is almost completely without foundation,” states Roach. “But life and death is not a binary system” says Dr. Oz: “[i]t makes sense, for many reasons, to draw the legal line at brain death, but that doesn’t mean it’s really a line” (188). Roach goes into transplant recipients who claim to take on characteristics of their previous owners’ personalities. This has not been proven scientifically, except that there are various post-operative “psychological consequences of having someone else’s heart stitched into your chest” (192).

The chapter concludes with the completion of H’s organ harvest. Roach casts H’s decision to be an organ donor in a very positive light: “But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on earth. To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don’t manage this sort of thing while they’re alive. Cadavers like H are the dead’s heroes...H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her” (195).

Decapitation and head transplants are the focus of Chapter Nine. Roach begins with the story of the guillotine. Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, the man after which the guillotine was named, lobbied for the guillotine’s use over hanging, billing it as a more humane way of execution. However, reports kept cropping up of terrifying stories regarding the guillotine, in which the severed heads are able to see, feel, and otherwise know the gory details of their demise. So, inFrance, a series of tests were undergone by various doctors and anatomists to test this possibility.

Roach goes through a number of French doctors, including a French physiologist name Legallois who believed that heads could be revived with oxygenated blood (201), and more notably Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde, who conducted numerous experiments on severed heads, due to the popular use of the guillotine in France at that time. Roach includes the criminals that Laborde experimented on (204). Roach concludes with the research of a French physician by the name of Beaurieux, who confirmed that decapitated heads did in fact have life for up to a few minutes after being severed from the body: “[u]sing Paris’s public scaffold as his lab, he [Beaurieux] carried out a series of simple observations and experiments on the head of a prisoner name Languille, the instant after the guillotine blade dropped” (205). Standing nearby as the blade falls upon Languille’s neck, Beaurieux calls out the prisoner’s name, moments after the head falls into the basket, and Beaurieux is shocked when the eyes of Languille return his gaze (205).

Roach moves the story from Paris to St. Louis, in the early 1900’s, when Charles Guthrie, a pioneer in the field of organ transplantation, developed a method for stitching one blood vessel to another, which was a breakthrough development for transplantation. Roach goes onto describe head transplantation experiments, largely performed on animals (dogs and monkeys). Vladimir Demikhov, in the Soviet Union, in the 1950s, was the first to restore a dog’s head to full cerebral function (208). Due to its immune system, the transplanted head would be rejected by its host body, though the brain would stay intact.

In the mid-1960’s, an Ohio neurosurgeon named Robert White began experimenting with “isolated brain preparations,” or when a living brain is removed from its subject and kept alive after being hooked up to another animal’s circulatory system (209). Roach, writing in the early 2000’s, decides to seek out Dr. White to ask him questions about these experiments. Roach meets with Dr. White, who isseventy-six years old at the time of their meeting, in Cleveland, where the lab in which he performed his landmark study on rhesus monkeys is located. Roach asks what Dr. White believes must have been going on in the isolated brain’s mind, and White compares the experience, possibly, to “the isolation chamber studies” of the 1970s, in which subjects went insane (211).

The importance of Dr. White’s rhesus monkey experiments is in their implications for humans. Head transplants, Roach goes on, are an area of research still under development. Dr. White’s experiments could potentially lead to a time where people who are succumbing to fatal diseasescan simply get a new body via head transplant and live out the remainder of their lives. Other countries, White says, are more eager to experiment with human subjects. That said, Roach explains the many reasons why that may never happen, including restriction from insurance companies, as well as societal ethics: “No matter how far the science of whole body transplantation advances, White or anyone else who chooses to cut the head off a beating-heart cadaver and screw a different one onto it faces a significant hurdle in the form of donor consent” (216). Organs, removed from their original owners, become impersonal objects, but “body transplants are another story. Will people or their families ever give an entire, intact body away to improve the health of a stranger?” (217). There is, Roach adds, ancient precedent for giving away whole human bodies. She writes that whole bodies were “for centuries a mainstay in the pharmacopoeias of Europe and Asia,” and some people even volunteered for the job (217).