Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and at the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget."

In between birth and death the human self, the mind, the consciousness - or the soul, if one prefers the term - resides within a physical object, the body. Regardless of our beliefs of what happens to the self at the moment of death, the body loses its normal functionality. Mary Roach's Stiff (2003) tells us in quite scientific - and often terrifying or hilarious - detail what happens to that empty vessel that once carried our self. A few weeks ago I have read (and reviewed here on Goodreads) Spook where Ms. Roach studies the question of the existence of afterlife; I appreciated the author's seemingly earnest commitment to the scientific method and, of course, the remarkable humor of her writing. So I expected a lot from Stiff, an even more popular book. And I am happy to say that the author has not disappointed me.

First, let's just enumerate some of the topics: observation of students working on cadavers in a gross anatomy lab, the biology and chemistry of cadaver decay and how the decay manifests itself visually, practices of embalming, use of cadavers in automotive crash tests, in determining causes of airplane accidents, and in studies on weapon and body armor design, harvesting organs from brain-dead patients, organ transplants, decapitation, medicinal use of cadavers, cannibalism, and - finally - methods of cadaver disposal (or, euphemistically, disposition), including freeze-drying and composting.

Sure, the book contains an overload of detail that some readers may call gruesome and sordid, and some others may suspect the author is trying to exploit the pornography of death - the common fascination of human beings with morbid details of death, dismemberment, and decay. Sure, there is some of this here but catering to the death fetish is offset by providing an attentive reader with food for thought on things one does not really care to think too much about. That the whole book does not slide into the ranks of death pornography is due to Ms. Roach's writing skills: her writing would best be characterized by a phrase that she herself uses to describe one of the crash researchers: "neither patronizingly euphemistic nor offensively graphic." Obviously the humor helps: the text is infused with enormous hilarity. Let me just mention the petit bouchon fécal and the story about the misdelivered package that was supposed to contain a cadaver, but instead included a very fine ham, a large cheese, a basket of eggs, and a huge ball of yarn.

So, contrary to what one might expect, this is quite a light book thanks to the author's sense of humor. Yet a reader will have a lot to think about. Most importantly: what is the actual relationship between our "self" and the body it is connected with? After we die, does the empty shell of the body have any connection with the "self"? Is my cadaver anything of value? And more practically: what should be done with our cadaver? Do we want the body to be buried? Cremated? Donated to science and then dissected into tiny pieces? Maybe we want it to be ecologically composted? Even more fundamentally: is it really the cadaver's temporary resident who should decide about the cadaver's disposition?

To me - obsessed with investigating the symptoms of the pandemic Euphemism Disease, the deplorable human trend to solve social and other problems by renaming them - the language issues involved in talking about death are absolutely the most interesting. Why do people prefer to say "passing" rather than "death"? Why "the decedent" rather than "the dead person"? Should the families who donate remains of their loved ones to research be informed what exactly will be done with these remains? As the author writes "[...] in the end [it] comes down to wording," and she presents an example of a statement, which accentuates the positive - contributions to helping other people - and euphemistically omits the specifics, which any family member can figure out if they care to think it through. "But most people don't care to think it through."

Four stars.

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