Next in my pile of "must read before they even get put on the bookshelf" books was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (2003). This book is basically as awesome as you might expect it to be. It includes chapters on practicing surgical techniques on dead bodies (or parts of them), the history of finding and using bodies to study anatomy, that body farm you sometimes hear about on CSI where they study decomposition, human crash dummies, human ballistics testers, crucifixion experiments, organ donation, human head transplants, cannibalism, and human composting. Whew.Sometimes the author's humor can get a little bit irritating, but ultimately she succeeds in writing a personal, and yet practical, view of the body after death and all the strange things that people have thought to do with it.
I also learned that if you do a google image search for the word "cadaver" you will come up with a delightful combination of gross, sad, funny, weird, and strange. Quite a variety. Cadavers are apparently a very interesting visual topic.After I finish the magazine I'm on, I'll be returning to the wonderful world of random reads. Only the randomizer on LibraryThing knows what jewel I'll be reading next.
5 comments:
That is an excellent question. Before I always sort of thought I'd want it cremated, although the biological compost chapter at the end of the book was very convincing. Its not like they put your body out in a compost heap, they accelerate the decomposition under pressure and with some special formula and you come out all ready to fertilize the earth.
I would absolutely donate any and all organs if I found myself in a brain-dead scenario, so keep that in mind folks. Everyone should do this.
I would be a little wary of "donating my body to science" as you can't really specify what happens to it. Disection would be fine with me, but getting ground up and used in plastic surgery would not be okay.
Anyway, I'm going to live for like another 100 years so I'm sure body disposing technology will have jumped leaps and bounds by then...
What are you guys going to do with your collective bods?
i loved that book! it was so interesting and creepy!!
I liked that book too.
There's a plastination exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science through September. I'm definitely going. I only wish plastinated corpse robots led the tour.
I think they talk about the same guy who did the work in the Houston exhibit in the book -- I know for sure that she visits a company that does the plastination stuff and it sounds like a completely awesome process.
i'm okay with my organs being donated, and then having parts of my body used for science, but part of me i want cremated so that charles krafft can use my ashes to make some spone.
http://www.antiquesatoz.com/artatoz/krafft/funerary.htm
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