I picked up Stiff from Vancouver Public Library. Stiff by Mary Roach has been around for a few years, but I got to it only now as I noticed it on a display case. The book must be very popular, as it is still distributed under “Fast Reads”, meaning I can only borrow it for 7 days, no renewals and one dollar late fee for each day. 3 weeks is the time for any other not so popular book.
This book about the curious lives of human cadavers is definitely a fast read. Mary Roach is a hilarious writer. She is not the medical types, but a writer for salon types. I had simply not thought about so many things about dead bodies until I read this book. I was surprised to find out what people and the medical community did with cadavers.
It starts of with the medical colleges using heads (fresh, not the embalmed) of the dead bodies to practice cosmetic surgery. Getting people to donate bodies to science is still a challenge today, even though it is common. In the olden days, it was quite complicated to get bodies for dissection and body snatching from the grave used to be a routine event. Dissecting a body leaves no place for a soul to come back was one of the thoughts. And dissecting was used as a threat in a different country. When someone commits a crime, he may be hanged. When someone commits a crime that is so harsh, he will be hanged and then dissected. It was used as a scare tactic.
My favorite chapter was using cadavers to figure out how an airplane accident happened, especially the ones that happen over the sea. There is no black box and the specialists study the damage done to the bodies to figure out if it was a bomb blast, a failure in the part of the aircraft and so on. The bodies can tell a lot even after they are dead. They are also studied to track car accidents, by safety departments and insurance companies for seat belts and the impacts. The cadavers are also used as dummies for car crash tests.
The life cycle of the dead is interesting as well. The anatomy labs are given the first choice for donated bodies and then the others get to choose. It finally ends up at the Body Farm, a criminal forensics campus at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The cadavers are allowed to decompose naturally for various studies. The crime investigators and the dogs are trained here to smell the bodies.
My other favorite aspect of the book is figuring out what to do with the remains of the body. To bury, cremate, turn it into compost, reduce it to liquids and flush it down the drain or embalm. So many choices. I was quite surprised to find that Mary Roach did not to go Varanasi. But I also found it refreshing, so many books or at least chapters have been beaten to death just about a westerner witnessing the burning of the bodies. I get bored of reading such accounts. Same same, nothing different.
The Promessa method is the freeze drying method to end up as compost. Susanne Wiigh-Mäsaks from Sweden has patented this method, where the body is frozen first and then uses ultrasound to break the body into tiny pieces, then freeze dried and ends up as compost. This is billed as a green alternative to go. There is a lot of resistance from the people who run the crematoriums and who make the caskets. I was quite impressed by descriptions of Sweden. The Swedes are a practical people who appreciate simplicity abhor frou-frou. After reading this, I want to visit Sweden.
The other method is the Tissue digestion. Where an alkaline is used to reduce the body to liquids and release it in the drain. Plastination is yet another method to be around as eternal as you possibly can and it costs $50,000. Organ harvest or organ recovery (PC or more businesslike) is used by transplant professionals to remove the important organs to be used by patients waiting for these surgeries.
I was quite impressed with the choices one can make. Although all methods are not available in all the countries. I am not very sure how I want to go. I do think donating organs or to be used by the medical community is a good choice for me. Mary Roach says that the survivors also need to be consulted and given a choice instead of the dead dictating the terms even after they have gone.
Death is a topic in all the religions, although everyday lives don’t deal with that. I read this somewhere while I was in India last year. Possibly in Tiruvannamalai, where Sri Ramana Maharshi is buried. Even though cremation is the usual custom of the Hindus, it is often prohibited in the case of a Yogi who is believed to have made the highest attainment. It is believed that the vital breath or unseen life-current remains in his body for thousands of years and renders the flesh exempt from corruption. In such a case, the Yogi’s body is bathed and anointed and then placed in a tomb in a sitting posture with crossed legs, as though he were still plunged in meditation. The entrance to the tomb is sealed with a heavy stone and then cemented over. Such a mausoleum becomes a place of pilgrimage. There exists still another reason why great Yogis are buried and not cremated, and that is because of the belief that their bodies do not need to be purified by fire since they were purified during their lifetimes.
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