Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
By Mary Roach pp $13.95
W.W. Norton &CompanyPaperback 304

The pain suddenly ebbing... the beckoning tunnel... the dazzling white light... the heavenly presence urging you onward... the splendid chords cascading through the brilliant blue silence... Whoops -- wrong book!

Those of you who are here for Angel Food: Lovely Thoughts On Death and Dying should pack up your crystals and leave before the going gets tough. Meanwhile the rest of us can consider the unholy mess unsolemnly presented to us by Mary Roach in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

Roach, who felicitously mixes the skills of humor columnist and science writer, has great respect for the dying but none whatever for death. She writes in the tradition of St. Paul, who two millennia ago bravely asked, "Death, where is thy sting; grave, where is thy victory?" But when Roach confronts the Grim Reaper, the overall effect is more comedic -- not so much "Death, where is thy sting?" as "Death, where are your pants?"

"Being dead is absurd," Roach writes. "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."

Unless, of course, you are one of those altruistic individuals who devote their earthly remains to things that might be of earthly use -- from organ transplants to medical training to scientific research that could improve the lot of the living in myriad ways. Such people -- and the people who need such people -- are at the heart of Roach's book. We meet an army of cadavers and the researchers who shoot them, slice them, cut off their limbs, probe their brains, whack them with the force of speeding cars and plummeting planes, and study their decaying bodies for clues to the secrets of putrefaction.

These are sights made tolerable only by Roach's dark, effervescent humor. It's just what we need as she hauls us to the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility -- the world's only institution devoted to the study of human decay.

The facility is a meadow dotted by bodies in various positions and states. Researchers do precise measurements of such unpleasant items as fluid loss, allowing police investigators the world over to pinpoint times of death and other forensic fundamentals.

One body catches the author's eye: "Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man's belly button. It's a rice-grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice.

"Let's not use the word 'maggot,' " she implores. "Let's use a pretty word. Let's use 'hacienda'..."

Without the nervously wisecracking Roach as a guide, such scenes would be no fun at all.

I, for one, would want nothing to do with the science of injury analysis, in which investigators deduce the cause of accidents by poring over human remains. Shepherding us through the aftermath of cars exploding and jets in nosedive, Roach lightens our load with some welcome horsing around.

"Generally speaking," she notes, "people falling from planes have booked their final flight." Even so, she tells us, one man set an unfortunate record by dropping seven miles from a plane, sans parachute, and surviving -- if only for a few hours.

As she gives us the gruesome facts, Roach never fails to remind the reader that getting them was no picnic either. At one point, she's interviewing an accident investigator in a quiet restaurant.

"Whenever the waiter appears to fill our water glasses, I pause, as though we were discussing something top secret or desperately personal. Shanahan seems not to care. The waiter will be grinding pepper on my salad for what seems like a week, and Dennis is going," ... used a scallop trawler to recover some of the smaller remains ... "

A dogged reporter, Roach does everything but plop herself on a crematorium conveyor belt to bring us the story of the dead. Witnessing the "harvest" of organs from a brain-dead woman, she gets her first glimpse of a beating heart.

"The thing is going wild in there," she writes. "It's a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that just won a Pontiac on 'The Price is Right.' "

For all the author's wit, though, there's a lot of stuff in Stiff that tests the fortitude of readers. An entertaining tale about alleged cannibalism at a restaurant in China is still a story about people chowing down on their dead. And as for Roach's account of plastic surgeons honing their skills on recently detached heads ... well, let's just say even laughter has its limits.

Fortunately, Roach has a higher aim than to win a literary gross-out contest. What shines through the gore is the essential dignity of people who choose to be of use to others -- even after they die. Cadavers, after all, have contributed to safer cars, sturdier planes, and even the kind of rubber bullets that are meant to subdue without killing.

In Roach's view, the people who once enlivened these dead husks deserve respect -- and their remains, at least, receive it. Her researchers never take advantage of their many opportunities to clown with cadavers. Her anatomy students develop thoughtful relationships with the corpses they cut up, and their medical schools hold serious observances honoring those who gave their bodies to the cause.

As for Roach, she's a believer. When she shuffles off the mortal coil, she wants her usable parts transplanted. Beyond that, she writes, she'll leave her disposition to her husband Ed. If Ed goes first, then the scientists will have their way with her.

One point for them to consider, though: Roach isn't crazy about the anatomy lab.

"The thought of young people gazing in horror and revulsion at my sagging flesh and atrophied limbs does not hold strong appeal," she writes. "I'm 43 and already they're doing it."

-- Steve Chawkins is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Last updated October 30, 2008
Copyright © 2004 Consumer Health Interactive

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