Mary Roach - Stiff

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First published in the United States of America by W.W. Norton & Company Ltd. 2003

First published in Great Britain by Viking 2003

Copyright © Mary Roach, 2003

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In several instances, names have been changed to respect privacy Photo credits: title page: Hulton Deutsch Collection/Corbis; p.17: Getty Images/Juliette Lasserre; p.35: Getty Images/Robin Lynn Gibson; p.59: Photofest; p.85: Photofest; p.111: Getty Images/Stephen Swintek; p.129: Hulton Deutsch Collection/Corbis; p.155: Geoffrey Clements/Corbis; p.

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ISBN 0-670-91217-4

Or almost always. Every now and then, it will happen that an anatomy student recognizes a lab cadaver. “I’ve had it happen twice in a quarter of a century,” says Hugh Patterson, an anatomy professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School.

I’m a believer in organ and tissue (bone, cartilage, skin) donation, but was startled to learn that donated skin that isn’t used for, say, grafting onto burn victims may be processed and used cosmetically to plump up wrinkles and aggrandize penises. While I have no preconceived notions of the hereafter, I stand firm in my conviction that it should not take the form of someone else’s underpants.

The human being of centuries past was clearly in another league, insofar as pain endurance went. The farther back you go, it seems, the more we could take. In medieval England, the patient wasn’t even tied down, but sat obligingly upon a cushion at the foot of the doctor’s chair, presenting his ailing part for treatment. In an illustration in The Medieval Surgery , we find a well-coiffed man about to receive treatment for a troublesome facial fistula. The patient is shown calmly, almost fondly, lifting his afflicted face toward the surgeon. Meanwhile, the caption is going: “The patient is instructed to avert his eyes and… the roots of the fistula are then seared by taking an iron or bronze tube through which is passed a red hot iron.” The caption writer adds, “The doctor would appear to be left-handed in this particular picture,” as if perhaps trying to distract the reader from the horrors just read, a palliative technique fully as effective as asking a man with a red-hot poker closing in on his face to “avert his eyes.”