Mary Roach - Grunt

In the same way amputees feel phantom pain in the space where the arm or leg once resided, penile amputees sometimes feel phantom pleasure. This, and phantom erections, were first described by the coiner of the phrase “phantom limb,” Silas Weir Mitchell. What gave Mitchell his particular expertise? He worked with Civil War amputees at the “Stump Hospital” in downtown Philadelphia.

Oh, for the titular economy of yesteryear. The Stump Hospital is gone and in its place we have the likes of the Veterans Affairs Center of Excellence for Limb Loss Prevention and Prosthetic Engineering. Though all is not lost. We still have a Foot & Ankle Center in London, a Breast Clinic in New Delhi, a Kidney Hospital in Tehran, the Face & Mouth Hospital in Calcutta, New York’s Eye and Ear Infirmary, and the Clínica de Vulva in Mexico. The poor penis has no hospital to call its own.

An exception is made for Dr. H. W. Bradford, who, for cosmetic purposes, transplanted a rabbit eye into the socket of a sailor who’d suffered a childhood eye injury. “The nature of the man’s calling,” wrote Bradford in the 1885 case study, “made it undesirable to use a glass eye.” I don’t know the precise occupational risks of the seafaring eyeball, but the prevalence of eye patches among pirates suggests they do exist.

Despite some clouding, the operation was deemed a moderate success. Though rabbits have larger pupils, their eyes are otherwise unnervingly similar to our own, as a Google Image search will quickly establish. I can’t recommend this activity, however, as the search results will include a photograph of a plastic-lined box captioned “Rabbit heads: no neck, no skin, with eyes. 100 grams each. Please contact me for price quotation.”

Except when he’s a Godfrey, as he is in many of his 1970s movie credits. Godfrey Daniels produced ten titles in the long-forgotten genre “soft core,” paying loving if needless attention to his plots, one of which could be a chapter in a Mary Roach book: “A research facility uses state-of-the-art equipment to test sex dolls.”

And the founder of Missing Something, my second-favorite amputee organization name, after Stumps R Us. I attended a Stumps bowling party in the 1990s, which served as my official introduction to the awesomeness of Hosmer Upper Extremity Prosthetics sporting attachments. In addition to the Bowling Attachment, Hosmer makes a Baseball Glove Attachment, and the pole-gripping Ski Hand/Fishing Hand. The Hosmer-equipped bowlers kicked my ass.

But not your iPhone. Smart smartphone thieves use the startle reaction to their advantage. They come up behind unsuspecting texters and whap them on the back of the head. The startled victim’s arms bend, launching the phone, which is effectively tossed to the thief.

More formally known as the “optional integrated phallus,” available in Caucasian and African American (different colors, same size).

Expendable items like Visceral Linings, Replacement Veins, Foreskins (for the Nasco Circumcision Trainer) and Laerdal’s Concentrated Simulated Vomit are known in the industry as “consumables.” In the case of the Simulated Boluses of chewed food that get stuck in the esophagus of the Laerdal Choking Charlie manikin, the term is doubly apt.

I suppose that by “seniors” Cartledge means people older than the boys; however, Spartan senior citizens weren’t the courtly walker-pushers of current stereotype. “Tribal elders” would screen babies for military worth; those deemed unfit were hurled into a chasm called “the deposits.” Nothing in antiquity makes much sense. Who gives cheese to a goddess of vegetation?

Kuno and his team spent a great deal of time exploring the differences between thermal and emotional sweating, the latter wetting the palms and soles and the former, everything but. One researcher excised a patch of leg skin and grafted it to his palm. Would the patch henceforth, unlike normal leg real estate, sweat when the man was nervous? (Yes.) Would it remain dry in emotionally trying circumstances, such as when colleagues tittered over the sudden and suggestive appearance of hair on one’s palms? (No.) The emotional sweat work conferred a corollary talent for lab-based sadism. The researchers invented and delivered terrible news to their subjects. They tasked them with oral arithmetic problems. They threatened to administer painful shocks, provoking “the uneasiness of expecting pain.” Kuno was the Stanley Milgram of perspiration.

The human head sweats like a mother. As the cradle of the brain, it’s served by a lot of blood vessels, and those vessels, unlike the vessels of the body’s other extremities, don’t constrict. Thus head wounds bleed readily and faces flush and sweat. But it’s misleading to say, as one so often hears, that people lose 90 percent of their body heat via their head. “My father-in-law, when he sees me go out in winter with no hat, always tells me that,” says military research physiologist Sam Cheuvront. “I say, ‘If that’s true then I should be able to put on a tassel cap and go outside naked and retain 90 percent of my body heat.’” When in fact, he’d be losing heat through his exposed body parts. Though gaining my affection.

Charms used to be part of ground rations, too. They were removed partly because of a persistent belief that they brought bad luck. No one at the Natick Labs Combat Feeding Directorate knows the origins of the unlucky-Charms superstition. I like this guess best, from the gun-enthusiast website AR15.com: “Because the plastic wrapper sticks… and results in you getting drilled in the brainpan because you were picking at a piece of candy and not paying attention.”

By the fair play rules of acronyms, this should be TEAT TD. Never mind, though. It’s hard enough for diarrhea researchers to get the respect they deserve without bringing teats on board.

Here is my diarrhea research statistic: When you are communicating with a pair of diarrhea researchers named Riddle and Tribble, there is a 94 percent chance you are going to slip up and refer to one or both of them as Dribble.

Full name: the Dorie Miller Galley. It is unusual for the military to use a nickname when naming a facility after one of its own. When the man’s full name is Doris, an exception is eagerly made. Doris “Dorie” Miller was a cook who showed commendable bravery during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, so commendable that his name appears on twenty-three government and civic facilities, eight opting for “Dorie” and fifteen—including the US Postal Service—embracing the full Doris. The US Navy named a frigate after Doris Miller. Since most frigates omit first names, the Doris issue was easily skirted, or pantsed.

The dose makes the poison. In small amounts, a mimic of the cholera/ETEC toxin is an effective treatment for constipation (in particular, the constipation that afflicts a third of irritable bowel syndrome sufferers). In 2012, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals released a synthetic version that was promptly forecast by one pharmaceutical market researcher to achieve “blockbuster status,” and what could be more fitting for a constipation drug?

I tried, but I cannot tell you who decided how much toilet paper to include in MREs, or how. But I can tell you a lot of other things about the TP, because I found the federal specifications, ASTM D-3905. I can tell you the required tensile strength, wet and dry. I can tell you the colors it’s allowed to come in (white, dull beige, yellow, green), the minimum grammage and basis weight, the percentage of postconsumer fiber, the required speed of water absorption. And maybe that’s our answer right there. Because if your anus is as securely clamped as the anus of whoever is in charge of “toilet tissue used as a component of operations rations,” ASTM D-3905, you probably don’t need much.