Stiff
The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach
The recap
What happens to a human body after its owner has finished with it? Mary Roach sets out to find the answer with a reporter's notebook, a sturdy stomach and a sense of humor that never quite switches off. She visits the places where the dead keep working: anatomy labs where students learn on donated bodies, seminars where surgeons rehearse face-lifts, a research facility that studies decay in the open air, and crash laboratories where cadavers teach engineers what a collision does to the skeleton. She also digs into the trade's murkier past, from the body snatchers who supplied early anatomists to strange experiments involving severed heads, crucifixion and medicinal cannibalism, and she looks ahead to new ways of disposing of ourselves, including human composting. Roach asks the questions most of us would be too polite to voice, then answers them with patient research and wry asides. The result is surprisingly tender, a book that leaves you grateful to the anonymous donors who quietly make modern medicine and safety possible.
Why read it
For anyone with a morbid streak and a strong stomach, or anyone who has wondered what donating a body to science really involves. Roach makes the macabre genuinely funny without ever mocking the dead.
Fun facts
- 01
The book grew out of Roach's stint as a columnist for Salon, where she wrote reported humor pieces on offbeat subjects, some of them about dead bodies.
- 02
For the car-safety chapter, Roach watched an impact test in Detroit in which researchers struck a donated cadaver, known only by a code number, to measure how much force a human shoulder can take.
- 03
Stiff was Roach's first book and became a New York Times bestseller, kicking off a long run of her curious, body-centered science books.
- 04
Washington State University picked Stiff as its campus-wide common reading book for the 2008–09 academic year.
