Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Roach visits a medical anatomy lab at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), in which forty severed human heads are lined up for facial surgery practice. The sheets under which the heads are placed are the color lavender, which Roach discovers is a color specifically chosen for its comforting quality: “[i]t surprises me to hear that men and women who spend their days pruning eyelids and vacuuming fat would require anything in the way of soothing, but severed heads can be upsetting even to professionals” (20). The forty heads “are from people who have died in the past few days and, as such, still look very much the way they looked while those people were alive” (20). The medical students are professionals, but they are people too; in order to operate on the heads, they must disassociate: “[d]issection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial” (21).

Marilena is one of the surgeons practicing facial surgery in the UCSF lab. Roach notes that Marilena is lucky to be able to practice on this dismembered head, because in days of yore, surgical practice took place “largely in the operating room,” with little margin for error (27). Roach launches into a history of early surgery, showing how the profession of surgeon underwent a major transformation in the eyes of the public. In modern times, surgeons are celebrated, but for centuries they “shared rank with barbers, doing little beyond amputation and tooth pullings, while physicians, with their potions and concoctions, treated everything else” (28).

Roach asks Marilena if she plans to donate her body to science, and Marilena says no, which surprises Roach. Marilena says that the “lack of respect” for the cadavers has informed her decision: “[m]ost doctors aren’t worried about a lack of respect from other doctors. Most of the ones I’ve spoken to would worry, if anything, about a lack of respect from students in the first-year gross anatomy lab—my next stop” (32). 

Human dissection was not always an acceptable practice in the medical community. Nowadays, the “gross anatomy lab,” the first time in which medical students are exposed to a human cadaver in their first-year, is a rite of passage in med school. Chapter Two looks at the practice of human dissection, past and present.

The chapter opens with a memorial service for the unnamed gross anatomy cadavers used by first-year students at the UCSF Medical School. In order for human dissection to be socially acceptable, cadavers must be treated by the medical community with dignity: “[m]edical schools have gone out of their way in the past decade to foster a respectful attitude toward gross anatomy lab cadavers. UCSF is one of many medical schools that hold memorial service for willed bodies” (38). Roach sees the legacy of indignity when she visits the gross anatomy lab, noticing that “no one made jokes the afternoon I was there, or anyway not at the corpses’ expense” (39).

The “cautious respect” for the dead that pervades present-day medical schools is due to the fact that the science of anatomy was built on illegal, sordid practices: “[f]ew sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy” (39). From ancient Egyptians’ dissection of live criminals to the practice of “gibbeting” (when a corpse is publicly maimed by crows) in 18th-century Britain, culture can sometimes have no reverence for the dead. The bodies of criminals were the first to be used for dissection, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries: “[w]orse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally, as a punishment worse than death” (41). Anatomists were on par with executioners at this moment in history.

When the burgeoning field of human anatomy reached its heyday in the 19th century, the need for bodies to practice on became more urgent: “[s]ome anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class” (43). Thus, body snatchers and resurrectionists became increasingly common to keep up with the demand from anatomists for cadavers. Illegal practices meant bodies were removed from the ground without care: “[l]ike the resurrectionists, the anatomists were men who had clearly been successful in objectifying, in their own minds at least, the dead human body” (46). Roach tells many sordid stories from this era of resurrectionists, when there was a shortage of legally dissectible bodies.

With present-day anatomy instruction, cadaver dissection is beginning to be phased out because learning modern medicine, with all its advances, needs to cover a lot of ground quickly: “[t]he changes in teaching of anatomy have nothing to do with cadaver shortages or public opinion about dissection; they have everything to do with time” (55). Modern technology can teach med students more quickly than live human dissection. 

The focus of Chapter Three is human decay. Roach investigates what happens to the body postmortem without intervention in the form of cremation, embalming, or any other preservation measure. To this end, Roach visits the University of Tennessee (UT) Medical Center’s field research facility which is the “only one in the world dedicated to the study of human decay” (61). The purpose of studying human decay is to establish a baseline to aid in forensic investigation: “[t]o understand how these variables affect the timeline of decomposition, you must be intimately acquainted with your control scenario: basic, unadulterated human decay” (62). Roach has this in mind when she visits the facility in Knoxville.

Arpad Vaas, an adjunct professor of forensic anthropology at UT, serves as Roach’s guide to the human decay research facility. Roach and Vaas are also accompanied by Ron White, a media relations person with UT, who, unlike Vaas, is uncomfortable being so close to decaying flesh. Vaas, even with his unflappable nature, had the “closest brush with on-the-job regurgitation” when a fly that had been feasting on a rotting corpse flew down his throat (63).

The UT research facility dedicated to human decay is a walled-off field on the furthest reaches of campus, where bodies are left in the open air and strewn across the field in various states of decay. Vaas begins the tour by showing Roach the newest body to arrive at the facility, which is a man who looks like “he could be napping” (64). Roach gets closer to the body and describes the gory biological processes like “autolysis,” when a body’s natural bacteria digests itself, and “gloving,”when the skin of the deceased hands sloughs off (65). Roach is intent on explaining the biological processes that accompany death: “[l]et us return to the decay scenario. The liquid that is leaking from the enzyme-ravaged cells is now making its way through the body” (66). Another body, further along in the putrefaction process, is in the “bloat stage,” in which bacteria cause gases to be expelled, thus creating bloat (66). The final stage of decay is putrefaction, the phase that lasts longest, and which “refers to the breaking down and gradual liquefaction of tissue by bacteria” (68). The last body Roach and Vaas view is furthest along in the process, a woman who “lies in mud of her own making” (68). Roach, Vaas, and White get lunch after their visit to the decay research facility, and the smell of death clings to them: “Arpad signals to the hostess that we are three. Four if you count The Smell” (72). Roach muses that if the people of the 18th and 19th centuries had known what happens with human decay, they would not have been so horrified at the prospect of dissection: “[o]nce you’ve seen bodies dissected, and once you’ve seen them decomposing, the former doesn’t seem so dreadful” (72).

Roach looks at an alternative to putrefaction: embalming. Roach goes through the embalming process on the body of a fifty-seven-year-old man, start to finish, with two students at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science. Roach also runs through the history of embalming, which began in the United States around the time of the Civil War, when fallen soldiers needed to be transported home to their families: “[i]t will make you a good-looking corpse for the funeral, but it will not keep you from one day dissolving, and reeking, from becoming a Halloween ghoul” (82). Here, Roach reminds the reader that we are biology.