Hannah Sears-2
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
By: Mary Roach
Pages 19-33
Chapter One: A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Practicing Surgery on the Dead
The chapter begins with the narrator, Mary Roach, visiting a conference for
aspiring plastic surgeons. She is there observing a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher
course, sponsored by a southern university medical center and led by a half-dozen of
America’s most sought-after face-lifters. Except this is not an ordinary plastic surgeon
convention; the subjects are dead. Mary Roach observes that surgery, even upon the dead,
is a tidy, orderly affair. She compares the scene to a catered reception. She continues on
visiting with several of the 40 participants at the conference. Each participant has their
own mental tricks so has to make the grotesque situation somewhat cheery. Mary Roach
ends the chapter by listing several examples of how the human cadaver’s head has
impacted sciences for the last 200 years.
Pages 37-57
Chapter Two: Crimes of Anatomy
Body Snatching and Other Sordid Tales from the Dawn of
Human Dissection
In the chapter Mary Roach delves in the world of human dissection’s past. The
first couple pages in this chapter focus on her past experiences visiting human anatomy
labs in colleges all over the world. She tells many stories about humorous incidents that
have occurred in her presents, but she also tells of many tragic times when a student sees
the cadaver for the first time and recognizes them. The first couple of pages truly showed
me the reality of death. The rest of the chapter took us back on a timeline of human
dissection. The earliest studies of the human body were done without any dissection, and
notebooks were written purely by a series educated guesses. But just like everything in
this world, someone had to come along and give us the idea of human dissection. It used
to be that human dissection was a punishment for criminals, but when the criminals ran
out anatomists were in a shortage for cadavers. So, they hired greedy desensitized young
men to go to fresh graves and dig up bodies so anatomists could practice on them. When
these approach ran into a dead end, murder was the next option, and this is when laws
began passing regulating human cadaver dissection. About a hundred years ago human
anatomists were among some of richest people. They paid their way through the practice
and they were donned as the most heartless and pathetic people of their era. Human
dissection has evolved immensely over the last hundred years and this chapter did a great
job of summarizing every milestone.