A brilliant book. Reading it is like hanging out with a very morbid and witty friend. It covers everything you might want to know about corpses including decomposition, how they are used to advance science, investigate aeroplane crashes, improve car and machinery safety, and test weapons; the history of body snatching, modern cannibalism, and the attempted recreation of the Turin shroud.

Of course it won't be for everyone, but I lapped it up.

Listened to the audiobook version.

The book itself: do not listen or read it on a full stomach. Do not listen or read it when you are about to eat. Just... do not. There were times when some of the details had me staring in horror at my audio device. A few times I felt my stomach turn. It is like a train wreck that you can't stop watching, you just plow onward through the chapters because each chapter is more horrifyingly interesting than the last. Part of this mind boggling need to press on is probably due in part to the author's wry comments that make the book more, dare I say, palatable. There is a strong moral bent towards body/organ donation, but otherwise it is pretty fair in leveling cultural perceptions from both sides of the field on various touchy subjects related to (the use of) dead bodies.

The audiobook: narration was excellent. I think Shelly Frasier was the narrator of my copy and her voice was very soothing but wondrously inflective* on those small bits of humor I mentioned above that really helps drag you through this crazy book. I think I would listen to just about anything she read regardless of topic.

*Shut up, spellcheck. I can make "inflective" a word! English language +1.

I was drawn to this book for a few reasons. Firstly, if I could do university all over again I would work to becoming a forensic anthropologist which is career that I find extremely fascinating. Secondly, my grandpa passed away in 2013 and he elected to donate his body to science and recently we just received information that he was ready for cremation. My grandpa used to joke about how the student was in for a interesting shock when they got to his lungs (he smoked several packs a day for almost his entire life) and his liver (he drank almost as much as he smoked). As my family and I will never fully know the adventure that my grandpa's body went on after he passed, I thought it might be interesting to know a possible path that he took.

Mary Roach takes readers on an strange adventure with what happens when someone donates their body to science. She takes reader through some history from how they have been procured to what the have been used for and the advancements that have been made because of work on them. The scientific aspects of the books are mixed in with Roach's own thoughts, feelings and whit. 

Each chapter takes on a different aspect in science that could benefit from the use of cadavers to work on; Plastic surgery to Crash Test Dummies Roach has deemed to explore a wide range for the use of cadavers (and it is by no need an extensive list, but she did choose some interesting ones that I never thought of). This book also touches on at times the use of animals in experiments and some that are pretty disturbing and what I would think would be straight out of a horror novel. For example attaching a decapitated puppy head to a live dog to determine if the flesh can be reanimated or survive. And I guess that brings me to my next point if you have a squeamish stomach this book will not be for you, as Roach does go in to a fair amount of detail at times.

This book has quite a bit of humour in it for the topic but you need to have a similar type of humour or not get offended easily in order to enjoy this book. Roach often gives her own personal observations or thoughts during the moment when researching or interviewing scientist about the "lives" of cadavers, and most of the time her thoughts could boarder on offensive to some people at the jokes or thoughts that just seem to pop in to her mind. I think that this is the part that people will either love or hate, however, this is what makes the book truly unique in voice instead of just stating scientific or history facts.

I liked learning about some of the curious lives that human cadavers can have now and in history and I am sure that there are many more adventures for them to have. Although Roach is not a medical professional (as you can tell from her personal comments) I think she did a great job in presenting the science as well as making it interesting. I would read another book by Roach and I seriously would consider donating my body to science even though I wouldn't want it to end up in some of the places the cadavers in this story did.

Enjoy!!!!!

   

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers―some willingly, some unwittingly―have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, 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.

Amazon.com

When BookRiot first released the categories for their Read Harder Challenge this year, one category was "microhistory". The GoodReads group page was immediately flooded with "WTH is microhistory?" These posts were then followed up by dozens of people recommending this book, Stiff by Mary Roach. Having an unread copy sitting on my own shelves for some time, I figured I might as well finally knock it out. 

Stiff approaches the topic of death and what happens to the body after the soul leaves from a purely academic curiosity standpoint. The thing that I thought made Roach's book unique to others that have covered this topic was Roach's own writing style, her comedic approach to what could otherwise be an uncomfortable subject to delve into for many. You might be concerned that that might open the writing up to distasteful jokes but Roach makes a point to note that each body she came in contact with during her research, she fully acknowledged was a beloved family member not long ago and was treated with due courtesy. Some other examples she offers:

>> University of California San Francisco carries out a 3 HOUR memorial service (I'm not sure of the frequency other than I believe it's done each year, possibly each semester?) for all cadavers donated to their medical department for research & teaching purposes.

>> She notes that in her research she discovered that some medical colleges across the country are actually trying to phase out of using full body human cadavers, instead trying to implement more use of pre-embalmed (specific) body parts, while other colleges are trying to push for full 3D digital imagery in place of cadavers (for use in teaching surgical techniques). She brings this up in the very first chapter when describing her experience sitting in on a class that was using severed cadaver heads to teach plastic surgery and facial reconstruction techniques.. and what an initially traumatizing sight it seemed to be for the students. Honestly, until I read this chapter, I never gave much thought on how plastic surgeons learn to do things like face lifts. Now it's hard to watch Botched the same way!

Roach uses some unique, sometimes odd, seemingly unrelated images to start off each chapter. For example, this Wizard Of Oz image introduces the topic of

a body's decaying process. 

Roach also notes the various uses of animals (largely because of their super sensitive sniffers) in detecting illness in people still living or picking up on clues at crime scenes that might otherwise go unnoticed. As gruesome as it is, I did find it fascinating to read that dogs have the ability to sniff water and pick up the scent of the gas being released from fatty molecules breaking down from submerged decomposing bodies. They're also able to pick up scents of bodies left on land up to 14 months after date of death! Speaking of the animals though, I do want to warn readers that some of the chapters on animals do make for some of the most difficult reading in the entire book (at least for me, anyway), particularly when she gets into what scientists have done to animals throughout history, in the name of science, when cadavers were not readily available. I'm giving you a heads up now, it's not pleasant reading there. 

While I found myself flying through many of the chapters pretty quickly, because -- can't help it --  I love me some weird and twisted history, there were parts that I felt ran a bit long -- the two worst sections for this being (again, just my own opinion here) chapter 11 "Out Of The Fire" and the section on the history and use of human crash test dummies (either chapter 4-5). 

But as I mentioned earlier, the bit that impressed me the most with this book was Mary Roach's own brand of humor and how it takes some of the awkwardness out of the topic for the reader.

With improvements in stethoscopes and gains in medical knowledge, physicians began to trust themselves to be able to tell when a heart had stopped, and medical science came to agree that this was the best way to determine whether a patient had checked out for good or was merely down the hall getting ice. 

 

Some sections honestly had me laughing out loud, while others... well, I still found myself laughing but maybe with a slight cringe. The cringe-laugh struck me especially during that first chapter when Roach describes going to that class featuring cadaver heads. One doctor left the class saying to the head "May she rest in peace" but Roach makes the joke "I heard rest in pieces." Those mildly off-color moments are rare though, for the most part I found her humor perfectly okay, if on the dark side, and right in line with my own (though...not sure what that says about me, lol). And I do have to agree with Roach that while it's great that medical knowledge grows leaps and bounds with each generation, it is a shame that we've lost the more quaint words of yesteryear such as "dropsy" and "scrofula" to terms now largely unpronounceable to those suffering from the conditions.  

I found this book really interesting but also a bit to irreverent for my tastes. Which speaking of taste, this book uses a fair amount of food analogies and phrases that are food based which is not something I really want to think about when also thinking about dead people.  But that's just me.