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Who knew that there were so many
uses — albeit weird, horrific and mesmerizing — to which the deceased human body can be
subjected? Salon writer Mary Roach explores cadaver farms, the history of anatomical
research, biomedical labs and more. Do you dare to follow?
Be forewarned.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted, nor is this a Stephen King novel that you can
shrug off as fiction. This is non-fiction at its most horrifically explicit. You know
you’re in trouble when you read a first sentence like this one:
“The
human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster
chicken.”
Roach is in a university medical center and she’s making the
comparison because she’s facing 40 human heads each in their own disposable aluminum
roasting pan for plastic surgeons to practice on. And what does Roach want to
know?
“Who cuts off the heads?” (Answer: Yvonne.)
If
you’re the type of person intrigued by the question, (and OK, that includes me), you’ll
jump into the book to learn what Roach finds out. For instance, did you know that to
gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage, the gibbet in plain
view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows”? Neither did I.
There’s much the living can learn about the dead and our history of their treatment here
in Roach’s book, some of which you may hope to forget as soon as
possible.
What makes the book easier to read is Roach’s sense of humor.
For example, in that five-sentence paragraph about the history of gibbeting, she
concludes:
“A stroll through the square must have been a whole different
plate of tamales back then.”
Her humor helps us get over the shock value
of the material early on. Unfortunately, that sense of humor eventually becomes
annoying. Her parenthetical comments intrude, like the jokes a teenager might make during
a health class on human reproduction. At first we’re all uncomfortable and the jokes
break the tension. But after awhile the jokes call attention to the joker so much that
you just want to turn around and tell her to drop it. Just tell me what you found out. So
the blasé, I’m -just-curious voice she brings to this project sometimes
misfires.
Despite my fatigue with the tone, I still recommend the book.
Ms. Roach is a facile writer. And let’s face it…the dead — the dead whom we never
knew as living — are fascinating. In the end, that fascination with the topic kept me
reading. So if you’re intrigued now, Ms. Roach will keep you hooked until the
end.
