The Working Dead
Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach (W.W. Norton, $13.95 304 pp. Trade paperback)
We've come a long way from the days when corpses were stolen and secretly sold to medical schools for use in anatomy class. Now people can choose to donate their bodies to science and wind up in an anatomy class by choice, or be used in a host of other medical studies.
Just out in paperback, this outrageously original and humorous book gives readers a front-row seat at how scienctists use cadavers to futher their knowledge.

Journalist Mary Roach goes "where no man has gone before," to witness, investigate and report on a branch of medicine and death that the general public never sees. Although it's not for the squeamish, her respectful yet humorous tone informs and entertains. This is not a perverse voyeuristic excercise; Roach's tone is always respectful to the dead, to the scientists and to the reader.

The disconcerting news is that few bodies are used entirely in one place. The days when an entire cadaver landed on a slab in front of a first-year medical student are quickly coming to an end because of advances in computer animation. Most often, bodies are dismembered to be used by different doctors for different studies. Roach quickly gets us used to this practice in the first chapter, titled "A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste." In one of the most disturbing images in the book, a team of plastic surgeons at a seminar each works on a dismembered head. A stickler for both the gruesome and the human detail, Roach talks to the person who dismembers the heads and to the surgeons about how they cope with the practice.

Roach provides context to her subject by examining the historical use of cadavers in medicine, which involved stolen corpses, executed prisoners or ill patients who volunteered for surgery. The narrative is full of unexpectedly hilarious moments, such as the author's attempt to confirm a story about a man in China who stole bodies from the crematorium where he worked. Rumor had it he gave the bodies to his brother who turned them into dumplings and sold them in his restaurant.

From charting human decay to impact tolerance studies to military weapons studies, cadavers have a full lives, constantly contributing to science and human safety. The last chapter deals with a new movement that advocates using ones body as compost to grow trees. Whether or not you want to donate your body to science, you now know the untold story.
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