Death Revisited, Which Is A Topic Of Eventual Interest To All Of Us
October 5, 2020 at 6:07 p.m.
By Max [email protected]
My interest in the subject likely stems from my advanced age and made more evident when I discovered by chance and then read Mary Roach’s book “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” It won a number of best book awards. Ms. Roach is an entertaining, informative and prolific writer, and she chooses odd titles and strange topics to write about. Other books she has authored include “Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War,” “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void,” “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” and “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.”
Biography
Mary Roach was born Hanover, N.H., and attended Hanover High School. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. She spent years working as a free lance copy editor, worked for the San Francisco Zoo and provided articles for the local newspaper’s Sunday magazine before writing her first book. Her writings have appeared in Salon, GQ, Discover, Vogue and the New York Magazine.
Oddities
As the title suggests, Stiff deals with practicing surgery on the dead, body snatching, human decay, crash victims, live burial, decapitation, cannibalism and even human composting. Despite the macabre subject matter, the book is respectful as it is irreverent and funny. For me, it was a true learning experience about topics I never dreamed I would be interested in. Some examples include animals with matching human anatomies including pigs who have similar hearts, goats with lungs like ours, brown bears with matching knees and even emus whose hips are dead ringers for ours. She even reported that the human head is of the same approximate size and weight of a roaster chicken.
I was surprised to learn that even when surgeons are in residencies, they aren’t typically given an opportunity to practice operations on donated cadavers. It has been this way since the early days of surgery: the teaching of the craft takes place largely in the operating room. For centuries, surgeons had shared rank with barbers, doing little beyond amputations and tooth extractions. It was proctology (the branch of medicine that deals with the rectum and anus) that helped pave the way for surgery’s acceptance as a respectable branch of medicine. In 1687, the king of France was surgically relieved of a painful and persistent anal fistula and was apparently quite grateful for his relief.
Today, there is a cautious respect for the dead demonstrated in the modern anatomy laboratory. This was not always the case, few sciences are as rooted in shame and infamy as human anatomy.
According to Mary Roach, the troubles began in Alexandria, Egypt, around 300 BC. King Ptolemy I, was the first leader to approve medical types to cut open the dead for the purposes of figuring out how bodies work. In part, this had to do with Egypt’s long tradition of mummification. During this process, bodies are cut open and organs removed. The king had a strange fascination for dissection and issued a royal decree encouraging physicians to dissect executed criminals. The tradition of using executed criminals for dissections persisted and hit its stride in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Human Decay
One of the chapters in Roach’s book deals with human decay – the chemical and physical phases it goes through, how long each phase lasts, and how the environment affects those phases. This helps to figure out when any given body dies. The potassium level of the gel inside the eyes is helpful during the first 24 hours, as is algor mortis (the cooling of a dead body). Corpses lose about 1.5 degrees Farenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them. Rigor mortis (stiffening of the joints and muscles of the body) is more variable, it starts a few hours after death, usually in the head and neck and continues moving on down the body, finishing up and disappearing anywhere from 10 to 48 hours after death.
The book contains a graphic description of the putrefaction process, describing how bacteria act after the human immune system is decommissioned. When we die, bacteria stop feeding on we’ve eaten and begin feeding on us. Bloat is most noticeable in the abdomen, where the largest numbers of bacteria are, but it happens in other hot spots as well most notably the mouth and genitalia.
Final Thoughts
As the back cover of the book suggests, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
My interest in the subject likely stems from my advanced age and made more evident when I discovered by chance and then read Mary Roach’s book “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” It won a number of best book awards. Ms. Roach is an entertaining, informative and prolific writer, and she chooses odd titles and strange topics to write about. Other books she has authored include “Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War,” “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void,” “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” and “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.”
Biography
Mary Roach was born Hanover, N.H., and attended Hanover High School. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. She spent years working as a free lance copy editor, worked for the San Francisco Zoo and provided articles for the local newspaper’s Sunday magazine before writing her first book. Her writings have appeared in Salon, GQ, Discover, Vogue and the New York Magazine.
Oddities
As the title suggests, Stiff deals with practicing surgery on the dead, body snatching, human decay, crash victims, live burial, decapitation, cannibalism and even human composting. Despite the macabre subject matter, the book is respectful as it is irreverent and funny. For me, it was a true learning experience about topics I never dreamed I would be interested in. Some examples include animals with matching human anatomies including pigs who have similar hearts, goats with lungs like ours, brown bears with matching knees and even emus whose hips are dead ringers for ours. She even reported that the human head is of the same approximate size and weight of a roaster chicken.
I was surprised to learn that even when surgeons are in residencies, they aren’t typically given an opportunity to practice operations on donated cadavers. It has been this way since the early days of surgery: the teaching of the craft takes place largely in the operating room. For centuries, surgeons had shared rank with barbers, doing little beyond amputations and tooth extractions. It was proctology (the branch of medicine that deals with the rectum and anus) that helped pave the way for surgery’s acceptance as a respectable branch of medicine. In 1687, the king of France was surgically relieved of a painful and persistent anal fistula and was apparently quite grateful for his relief.
Today, there is a cautious respect for the dead demonstrated in the modern anatomy laboratory. This was not always the case, few sciences are as rooted in shame and infamy as human anatomy.
According to Mary Roach, the troubles began in Alexandria, Egypt, around 300 BC. King Ptolemy I, was the first leader to approve medical types to cut open the dead for the purposes of figuring out how bodies work. In part, this had to do with Egypt’s long tradition of mummification. During this process, bodies are cut open and organs removed. The king had a strange fascination for dissection and issued a royal decree encouraging physicians to dissect executed criminals. The tradition of using executed criminals for dissections persisted and hit its stride in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Human Decay
One of the chapters in Roach’s book deals with human decay – the chemical and physical phases it goes through, how long each phase lasts, and how the environment affects those phases. This helps to figure out when any given body dies. The potassium level of the gel inside the eyes is helpful during the first 24 hours, as is algor mortis (the cooling of a dead body). Corpses lose about 1.5 degrees Farenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them. Rigor mortis (stiffening of the joints and muscles of the body) is more variable, it starts a few hours after death, usually in the head and neck and continues moving on down the body, finishing up and disappearing anywhere from 10 to 48 hours after death.
The book contains a graphic description of the putrefaction process, describing how bacteria act after the human immune system is decommissioned. When we die, bacteria stop feeding on we’ve eaten and begin feeding on us. Bloat is most noticeable in the abdomen, where the largest numbers of bacteria are, but it happens in other hot spots as well most notably the mouth and genitalia.
Final Thoughts
As the back cover of the book suggests, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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