STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

  STIFF (Norton, 2003) by Mary Roach is a minefield! Whether discussing grave robbing (entertaining), the brutality of crash tests cadavers (informative), puppy mutilations (horrifying), or human head transplants (macabre and horrifying), Roach shirks from nothing and conceals not a detail. Not - A - Detail! She does, however, remain cognizant that her readers occasionally need air, and she always intercedes at that pivotal moment as we dazedly stumble toward the minefield. Take a moment, my readers, she allows. Breath. We do, and she moves on.  

    About twenty-five years ago, after watching yet another documentary on battery chicken farms, I became a vegetarian, although I continue to eat and love seafood. Very unfortunately, but quite correctly, Roach compares deep frying live newborn mice (a Chinese delicacy) with tossing live lobsters into boiling water (a Nova Scotia delicacy). This audiobook paragraph was inexorable and, try as I might, I cannot unhear it. As I cross lobster off my diminishing list of protein sources, I curse you, Mary Roach!

     Roach’s book is instructive and gives us clarity about the modern lives of cadavers and the sometimes wonderful, sometimes horrifying history of how we got here. Donating one’s body to science is consenting to scientific research and everything that entails, she says, and that is something we usually don’t think about. Donating is different from being an organ donor. It is a complete abandonment of the body and it gives blanket permission for all that follows. Medical students learn and surgeons practice their skills. Crash testing real bodies do the job a synthesized body cannot. It is brutal but essential research in vehicular safety. A side benefit is that I have learned enough to become a grave robber using only tools from my hall closet. I suspect, however, that this market has already bottomed out.

          Roach delves deeply into the history of cadavers, travelling the world to gather research and to gain insight into cultural traditions and processes. My personal favourite is the ‘Mellified Man’ recipe which Roach includes under medicinal cannibalism in Chapter 10: Eat Me. The mellification process goes like this. An elderly person volunteers to eat and bathe in honey until dead, which apparently takes about a month. The body is placed in a stone coffin, covered in honey, and steeped for one hundred years, after which time a confection has formed. This confection is administered topically or orally for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs and other ailments. “A small amount taken internally will immediately cure the complaint.” Roach writes that Li Shih-chen, author of the Chinese Materia Medicat (1597) expressed doubts about the veracity of this story. He did, however, include the recipe in his book. STIFF is informative, entertaining, and historically fascinating, and occasionally deeply disturbing. However, Roach is never distasteful in the details, distressing though they sometimes are. She writes without emotion and without judgment, and her wry humour carries us from one difficult topic to another, acting as a parachute lest we spin into freefall.

         “Because dead people look very much like live people,” Roach says in an interview with Tyler Cowen at George Mason University, “there is a tendency to treat them as though they are still people.” But she reminds us that cadavers are not people and, “as cadavers, they have superpowers that give us answers we can’t get any other way.”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjwgML2Sm9w&feature=emb_title). 

       Roach is driven by curiosity. Watching the interview with her is like seeing sparks dance above a campfire. She is witty, chatty, and immensely knowledgeable about her research. I read, listened, watched, and learned. Her ready smile, engaging chatter and merry laugh are quite at odds with her authorial topics. Defecation Induced Sudden Death? A real thing. It killed Elvis. At what point should roadkill not grace the dinner table? Undecided.

          There are few authors who would write, or could write, a book such as STIFF and it seems to me that Mary Roach has written the unwritable. STIFF is a splendid marriage of history, scientific evolution, horror, fact, and humour and it carefully informs those among us who wish to donate our bodies to science. Roach’s books are widely read and continue to make the New York Times bestseller list. STIFF The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is not, however, a book for the fainthearted.