Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull. Or that was how it seemed to me.” 

Roach is an active participant in this book. She offers up her own experiences, including the deeply personal account of her mother’s death, to demonstrate the differences between “person” and “cadaver,” a difference that is highly emotional. This section also engenders some sympathy for Roach.

“I mention this to the young woman whose job it was to set up the seminar this morning that the lavender gives the room a cheery sort of Easter-party feeling. Her name is Theresa. She replies that lavender was chosen because it’s a soothing color.” 

A persistent theme in Stiff is understanding how those who handle cadavers as part of their research emotionally deal with the experience, which ranges from sociopathic delight to necessary disassociation.

“Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy.” 

Body snatching, sacrilege, and a general history of disrespect permeates the history of anatomy and dissection, as detailed in Chapter Two. As a reaction to this, in modern anatomy—and in the culture at-large—there is a cautious respect to handling the dead. 

“I asked Hugh Patterson about this and learned that, in fact, whole cadaver dissection is being phased out at some medical school.” 

Those who perform work on the dead must maintain an emotional distance from their dead subjects in order to perform the gruesome, but necessary, task at hand. Using parts of cadavers, disembodied from the whole, makes the body seem more an object and less a person.

“But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.” 

Gross anatomy labs are where medical students first encounter a dead body. It is a rite of passage that Roach spends a great amount of detail explaining, due to the fact that such labsare a key part of becoming a doctor. 

“Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz? (‘I’m melting!’) Putrefaction is more or less a slowed-down version of this. The woman lies in a mud of her own making. Her torso appears sunken, its organs gone—leached out onto the ground around her.” 

Pop culture comparisons like this one give a familiar, light-hearted reference point to an otherwise disturbing situation that takes place on the campus of the University of Tennessee. 

“Ron turns on his heels. ‘Great.’ We ruined Rice Krispies for Ron, and now we have ruined chicken soup.” 

Figures such as Ron, who are actively disgusted with the processes surrounding death, serve as figures with which the reader can relate. 

“The distance between the very old, sick, frail person and the dead one is short, with a poorly marked border. The more time you spend with the invalid elderly (I have seen both my parents in this state), the more you come to see extreme old age as a gradual easing into death.” 

After viewing UM 600, the impact-studies cadaver Roach is observing, be thrust and adjusted into a car, she has this realization about her own parents. They were as frail and feeble as UM 600 prior to their deaths. 

“For Shanahan, the hardest thing about Flight 800 was that most of the bodies were relatively whole.” 

Professionals like Dennis Shanahan, the injury analyst who examines dead bodies to determine the sequence of events, as with the plane crash, in this example, must disassociate the person from the work, to a certain degree. Examining body parts is gory, but impersonal; when bodies are recovered whole, it is more difficult for Shanahan to suppress his emotional response.

“I am about to fire a bullet into the closest approximation of a human thigh outside of a human thigh: a six-by-six-by-eighteen-inch block of ballistic gelatin.” 

Roach conducts first-person investigative research for Stiff, which gives an urgent sense to the book. Here, we see her testing “neural overload theory” by firing a gun into ballistic gelatin. 

“I think when you get yourself down deep into a project like this, you lose sight of how odd you must appear to the rest of the world.” 

This quote refers to Frederick Zugibe, a medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, who sought to prove the Crucifixion as a genuine event. To do this, Zugibe constructed a cross in his garage in suburban New York, in the mid-1960s, and had volunteers attached to it.

“Since the odds of our meeting at a cocktail party are slim and the odds of my managing to swing the conversation around to speculums slimmer still, let me take this opportunity to share: The earliest speculum dates from Hippocrates’ day and was a rectal model.” 

Stiff is chock full of information and humorous, interesting asides and tangential oddities. In this aside, Roach gestures to the unusual origins of the speculum, a modern-day gynecological instrument.

“At one point—to the astonished shouts of all present—the prisoner slowly opened one eye, as if, with great and understandable trepidation, he sought to figure out where he was and what sort of strange locality hell had turned out to be.” 

With her characteristic dark humor, Roach recaps an experiment by French physiologist Laborde in the 19th century, in which he attempted to reanimate a severed head.

“That’s not what would have gotten to me. What would have gotten to me was the look on the monkey’s face when the anesthesia wore off and it realized what had just taken place.” 

Roach imagines what it must have been like to be in the room, during Dr. White’s rhesus monkey head-transplant experiments,and considers what it must have been like to view the faces of the monkeys as they were reanimated on different bodies.

“Body transplants are another story. Will people or their families ever give an entire, intact body away to improve the health of a stranger?” 

This is one of many examples of the sort of ethical questions raised by the notion of head transplantation. 

“The medicinal use of mummified—though not usually mollified—humans is well documented in chemistry books of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, but nowhere outside of Arabia were the corpses volunteers.” 

Though the practice of cannibalism seems far-fetched, Roach puts it into the context of a longstanding history of ingesting and using human remains and body parts.

“Examples for the Ming Dynasty were so numerous that Chong gave up on listing individual instances and presented them instead as tallies by category: In total, some 286 pieces of thigh, thirty-seven pieces of arm, twenty-four livers, thirteen unspecified cuts of flesh, four fingers, two ears, two broiled breasts, one waist loin, one knee, and one stomach skin were fed to sickly elders.” 

In China, during the Ming Dynasty, it was common practice for daughters to offer up curative elixirs made from human flesh. This list of body parts shows the widespread nature of cannibalism during this time. 

“We are all products of our upbringing, our culture, our need to conform.” 

Roach brings up cultural conformity in the chapter on cannibalism, particularly with reference to Diego Rivera, though it is relevant when considering all attitudes surrounding death. 

“Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics.” 

Eschewing taboo, Roach asks difficult questions about death. Here, she asks an anthropologist if there is a society in which cannibalism might be a viable option. 

“With our own deaths, the disposal of the body was for centuries incorporated into the ritual of memorial and farewell. Mourners are present at the lowering of the coffin and, until more recently, the measured, remote-control conveyance of the casket into the cremation furnace.”

Dignity in death is a major theme throughout the book. To tease out this idea, Roach compares the elaborate funerals of humans to animal disposal, which is mainly about discarding waste. 

“The sight is a disquieting blend of horse-as-we-know-it—placid, defected horse face; silken mane and neck where younger girls’ hands went—and slasher-flick gore.” 

Roach describes the gore of “tissue digestion,” an alternative to cremation. 

“The mentality of Sweden is a good deal closer. The thought of ‘living on’ as a willow tree or a rhododendron bush might easily appeal to a nation of gardeners and recyclers.” 

Cultural norms greatly influence how people understand and process death. 

“Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you’re gone—of still being there, in a sense.” 

Roach examines humankind’s basic fear of death. She finds that, with postmortem wishes surrounding the body, it is often a way of extending life after death. People cannot imagine death, so they take responsibility for their bodies even after death.