Mary Roach’s Stiff is a paean to dead bodies. She notes in the introduction that “Cadavers are our superheroes: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. . . . What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind.”
I wholeheartedly agree with her perspective, which is why I found it troubling to realize there is still so much squeamishness around what we can and can’t do with a dead human body. Roach also notes in the introduction that some people may be offended by her book, and she is correct, although for me it probably wasn’t in the way she imagined. I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that a taboo still exists around shooting guns at a cadaver. I’m not talking about prisoners and war casualties who have no choice in the matter: I’m all for respecting the physical remains of our enemies and most unfortunate members of our society. I’m talking about people who knowingly and willingly leave their bodies to science for the purpose of research. Why should we be squeamish about how those bodies are used? For example, during the Korean War, improvements were made to bullet-proof vests by providing them to living soldiers and sending them into battle, then measuring how well the vests worked. In Central America, a police department tested their vests by having officers put them on and then shooting at them. Because somehow shooting at living humans is more politically correct than shooting at dead humans. If you ask me, that’s some weird prioritization, humanity.
Even worse, in my opinion, is that we, as a society, are more sensitive to the treatment of dead bodies than we are to live animals. Roach recounts medical experiments performed on animals that left me horrified. Not all of these experiments were conducted hundreds of years in our past. I fully expect to read about pragmatic barbarism toward animals in the 15th century, but the attitude of modern science toward live subjects makes me shudder.
Quite understandably, sensitivity around treatment of dead bodies has more to do with the personal feelings of the living. Nobody wants to know that their great aunt Sarah, who was a gourmet pastry chef and sang in her church choir, is being decapitated, disemboweled, or enduring any number of other indignities, no matter what good it may do for the human race in the long term. That’s why most families don’t want to know the details of what’s happening to their loved one’s remains. A family might be told that their relative’s organs are being used to study ocular trauma. They won’t be told that the eyes are being popped out of the head and paddled around like ping pong balls or shredded in a Cuisinart (I made up these experiments). We want to remember Aunt Sarah as she was, not as a science experiment.
The ethics and sensibilities around scientific research is just one portion of this book. Roach provides many other interesting tidbits, such as the rate at which maggots can eat subcutaneous fat, and the year in which necrophilia first became a crime in the United States (1965, although, as of 2003 when Stiff was published, only 16 states had enacted necrophilia laws, which makes the squeamishness around shooting a dead body with a gun even more disconcerting to me).
Roach is an engaging writer who uses humor liberally, such as when she compares the aforementioned maggots under the skin as looking like “expensive Japanese rice paper,” and then adds conspiratorially, “You tell yourself these things.” I just couldn’t enjoy the humor in this book as much as I did in, say, Gulp, not because I think the human body is too sacred to be joked about, but because the human body is treated as sacred to the overall detriment of scientific betterment. None of this is Roach’s fault, but it’s the reason I just couldn’t enjoy this book as much as I wanted.
Overall, I suspect Roach and I are close to being on the same page when it comes to bodies. In one chapter, she talks about organ donation and a patient with pseudonym “H,” whose family allowed her organs to be harvested. “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.”
Amen.