by Mary Roach
Chong, Key Ray. Cannibalism in China. Wakefield, N.H.: Longwood Academic, 1990.
Garn, Stanley M., and Walter D. Block. “The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism.” American Anthropologist 72: 106.
Harris, Marvin. Good to Eat. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
Kevorkian, Jack. “Transfusion of Postmortem Human Blood.” American Journal of Clinical Pathology 35 (5): 413–19 (May 1961).
Le Fèvre, Nicolas. A Compleat Body of Chymistry. Translation of Traicté de la chymie, 1664. New York: Readex Microprint, 1981. Landmarks II series. Micro-opaque.
Lemery, Nicholas. A Course of Chymistry. 4th edition, translated from the 11th edition in the French. London: A. Bell, 1720.
Peters, Hermann. Pictorial History of Ancient Pharmacy. Translated and revised by William Netter. Chicago: G. P. Engelhard, 1889.
Petrov, B.A. “Transfusions of Cadaver Blood.” Surgery 46 (4): 651–55 (October 1959).
Pomet, Pierre. A Compleat History of Druggs. Volume 2, Book 1: Of Animals. Third edition. London, 1737.
Read, Bernard E. Chinese Materia Medica: Animal Drugs. From the Pen Ts’ao Kang Mu by Li Shih-chen, A.D. 1597. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1976.
Reuters. “Court Releases Crematorium Cannibals.” Oddly Enough section. 6 May 2002.
———. “Diners Loved Human-Flesh Dumplings.” Arizona Republic, 30 March 1991.
Rivera, Diego. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography. Reprint. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1991.
Roach, Mary. “Don’t Wok the Dog.” California, January 1990, 18–22.
———. “Why Doesn’t Anyone Have Dropsy Anymore?” Salon.com, 2 July 1999.
Sharma, Yojana, and Graham Hutchings. “Chinese Trade in Human Foetuses for Consumption Is Uncovered.” Daily Telegraph (London), 13 April 1995.
Tannahil, Reay. Flesh and Blood. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1975.
Thompson, C. J. S. The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1929.
Walen, Stanley, and Roy Wagner. “Comment on ‘The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism.’” American Anthropologist 73: 269–70 (1971).
Wootton, A. C. Chronicles of Pharmacy. London: Macmillan, 1910.
Zheng, I. Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China. Translated by T. P. Sym. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.
CHAPTER 11: OUT OF THE FIRE, INTO THE COMPOST BIN
Mills, Allan. “Mercury and Crematorium Chimneys.” Nature 346: 615 (16 August 1990).
Mount Auburn (Massachusetts) Cemetery Scrapbook I, page 5. “Disposing of Corpses: Improvements Suggested on Burial and Cremation.” Article from unnamed newspaper, 18 April 1888.
Prothero, Stephen. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
CHAPTER 12: REMAINS OF THE AUTHOR
O’Rorke, Imogen. “Skinless Wonders: An Exhibition of Flayed Corpses Has Been Greeted with Popular Acclaim and Moral Indignation.” The Observer (London), 20 May 2001.
United Press International. “Boston Med Schools Fear Skeleton Pinch: Plastic Facsimiles Are Just Passable.” Chicago Tribune, 15 June 1986. Final Edition.
HOW TO DONATE YOUR BODY TO SCIENCE
Donating your body to science is different from donating organs for transplant. Being an organ donor involves marking your driver’s license and letting your family know that you want your organs donated in the event that you wind up brain-dead and on a respirator (which keeps the organs viable for a few days pending the transplant). Please do this. Eighty-three thousand people are waiting for organs, and sixteen die every day.
To donate your body to a medical school or university for research, you’ll need to contact the facility. The Anatomy Board of the University of Florida Web site has a state-by-state list of universities with Willed Body Programs and their phone numbers. Go to www.med.ufl.edu/anatbd/usprograms.html. If this list is no longer in existence, try a Web search for “willed body program” and the name of your state. Contact the institution you’d like to donate yourself to and request a willed body donor form and information packet. Be sure to talk to your family about your plans. For one thing, they’ll need to call the university to come get you when the time comes.
You can’t specify what you’re used for; you go where there’s a need. The majority of willed bodies wind up in the anatomy department. Almost none end up in the English department. Medical conferences where surgeons practice new techniques are another common venue. If there’s something you’d rather not be used for, make this clear on your donor form or in an attached note. Have fun!
* Or almost always. Every now and then, it will happen that an anatomy student recognizes a lab cadaver. “I’ve had it happen twice in a quarter of a century,” says Hugh Patterson, an anatomy professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School.
* I’m a believer in organ and tissue (bone, cartilage, skin) donation, but was startled to learn that donated skin that isn’t used for, say, grafting onto burn victims may be processed and used cosmetically to plump up wrinkles and aggrandize penises. While I have no preconceived notions of the hereafter, I stand firm in my conviction that it should not take the form of someone else’s underpants.
* The human being of centuries past was clearly in another league, insofar as pain endurance went. The farther back you go, it seems, the more we could take. In medieval England, the patient wasn’t even tied down, but sat obligingly upon a cushion at the foot of the doctor’s chair, presenting his ailing part for treatment. In an illustration in The Medieval Surgery, we find a well-coiffed man about to receive treatment for a troublesome facial fistula. The patient is shown calmly, almost fondly, lifting his afflicted face toward the surgeon. Meanwhile, the caption is going: “The patient is instructed to avert his eyes and…the roots of the fistula are then seared by taking an iron or bronze tube through which is passed a red hot iron.” The caption writer adds, “The doctor would appear to be left-handed in this particular picture,” as if perhaps trying to distract the reader from the horrors just read, a palliative technique fully as effective as asking a man with a red-hot poker closing in on his face to “avert his eyes.”
* Which was also, up until 1965, not a crime in any U.S. state. When necrophilia’s best-known modern-day practitioner, Sacramento mortuary worker Karen Greenlee, was caught absconding with a dead young man in 1979, she was fined for illegally driving a hearse but not for the act itself, as California had no statutes regarding sex with the dead. To date, only sixteen states have enacted necrophilia laws. The language used by each state reflects its particular character. While taciturn Minnesota refers to those who “carnally know a dead body,” freewheeling Nevada spells it all out: “It is a felony to engage in cunnilingus, fellatio, or any intrusion of any part of a person’s body, or any object manipulated or inserted by a person into the genital or anal openings of the body of another where the offender performs these acts on the dead body of a human being.”
* How could people of the nineteenth century have allowed teeth from cadavers to be put into their mouths? The same way people from the twenty-first century can allow tissue from cadavers to be injected into their faces to fill wrinkles. They possibly didn’t know and probably didn’t care.
* With the help of an interpreter, I got the number of an Oscar Rafael Hernandez living in Barranquilla. A woman answered the phone and said that Oscar was not in, whereupon my interpreter gamely asked her if Oscar was a garbage picker, and if he had been almost murdered by thugs who wanted to sell him to a medical school for dissection. A barrage of agitated Spanish ensued, which my interpreter summed up: “It’s the wrong Oscar Rafael Hernandez.”
* Sheena Jones, the secretary at the college who told me about the wallet—which she called a “pocket book,” nearly leading me to write that ladies’ handbags had been made from Burke’s hide—said it had been donated by one George Chiene, now deceased. Mrs. Jones did not know who had m
ade or originally owned the wallet or whether Mr. Chiene had ever kept his money in it, but she observed that it looked like any other brown leather wallet and that “you would not know it is made from human skin.”
* Purists among them insist on the real deal. I spent an afternoon in an abandoned dormitory at Moffett Air Force Base, watching one such woman, Shirley Hammond, put her canine noses through their paces. Hammond is a fixture on the base, regularly seen walking to and from her car with a pink gym bag and a plastic cooler. If you were to ask her what she’s got in there, and she chose to answer you honestly, the answer would go more or less like this: a bloody shirt, dirt from beneath a decomposed corpse, human tissue buried in a chunk of cement, a piece of cloth rubbed on cadavers, a human molar. No synthetics for Shirley’s dogs.
* And, alas, most expensive and least well attended. In May 2002, a year after I visited, it closed its doors.
* But by no means the first to attempt to keep bodies from rotting. Outtakes of the early days of corporeal preservation included a seventeenth-century Italian physician named Girolamo Segato, who devised a way of turning bodies into stone, and a London M.D. named Thomas Marshall, who, in 1839, published a paper describing an embalming technique that entailed generously puncturing the surface of the body with scissors and then brushing the body with vinegar, much the way the Adolph’s company would have housewives prick steaks to get the meat tenderizer way down in.
* Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on “the father of” turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women’s boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern dairying, Canada’s permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus.
* Other lively things to do with X-ray video cameras: At Cornell University, biomechanics researcher Diane Kelley has filmed lab rats mating in X-ray, in order to shed light on the possible role of the penis bone. Humans do not have penis bones, nor have they, to the author’s knowledge, been captured having sex on X-ray videotape. They have, however, been filmed having sex inside an MRI tube, by fun-loving physiologists at the University Hospital in Groningen, Netherlands. The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis “has the shape of a boomerang.”
* From a safety standpoint, it would have been better to skip steering wheels entirely and install a pair of rudderlike handles on either side of the driver’s seat, as was done in the “Survival Car,” a traveling demo car built by the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in the early 1960s to show the world how to build cars that save lives (and reduce insurance company payouts). Other visionary design elements included a rear-facing front passenger seat, a feature about as likely to sell cars as, well, steering rudders. Safety did not sell automobiles in the sixties, style did, and the Survival Car failed to change the world.
* This is why you shouldn’t worry all that much about sitting in the middle seat, without a shoulder belt. If the car gets hit from the side, you’re better off being farther from the doors. The kindly people beside you, the ones with the shoulder belts, will absorb the impact for you.
* To quote a Stapp Car Crash Conference study on the topic. “Pedestrians are not ‘run over’ by cars. They are ‘run under.’” It typically goes like this: Bumper hits calf and front of hood hits hip, knocking the legs out from under and flipping them up over the head. The cartwheeling pedestrian then lands on his head or chest on the hood or windshield. Depending on the speed of the impact, he may continue cartwheeling, legs over head again, and land flat on the roof, and from there slide off onto the pavement. Or he may remain on the hood, with his head smashed through the windshield. Whereupon the driver calls an ambulance, unless the driver is someone like Fort Worth nurse’s aide Chante Mallard, in which case she keeps on driving, returns to her house, and allegedly leaves the car in the garage with the victim sticking out of her windshield until he bleeds to death. This event took place in October 2001. Mallard was arrested and charged with murder.
* As fans of the eating sections of old Guinness books of world records will surmise, this figure has been surpassed on numerous occasions. Some stomachs, by way of heredity or prolonged daily gourmandism, are roomier than average. Orson Welles’s was one such stomach. According to the owners of Pink’s hot dog stand in L.A., the voluminous director once sat down and finished off eighteen franks.
The all-time record holder would appear to be a twenty-three-year-old London fashion model whose case was described in the April 1985 Lancet. At what turned out to be her last meal, the young woman managed to put away nineteen pounds of food: one pound of liver, two pounds of kidney, a half pound of steak, one pound of cheese, two eggs, two thick slices of bread, one cauliflower, ten peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, two pounds each of plums, carrots, and grapes, and two glasses of milk. Whereupon her stomach blew and she died. (The human gastrointestinal tract is home to trillions of bacteria, which, should they escape the confines of their stinky, labyrinthine home, create a massive and often fatal systemic infection.)
Runner-up goes to a thirty-one-year-old Florida psychologist who was found collapsed in her kitchen. The Dade County medical examiner’s report itemized the fatal last meal: “8700 cc of poorly masticated, undigested hot dogs, broccoli and cereal suspended in a green liquid that contained numerous small bubbles.” The green liquid remains a mystery, as does the apparent widespread appeal of hot dogs among modern-day gorgers (from Salon.com).
* This was a subject of heated debate in ophthalmology corners. Some felt that if you made baseballs softer, they would deform on impact and penetrate more deeply into the socket, causing more damage, not less. A study done by researchers at the Vision Performance and Safety Service at Tufts University School of Medicine showed that softer balls did indeed penetrate more deeply, but they didn’t cause more damage. That would have been tough to do, for the harder balls ruptured the eye “from the limbus to the optic nerve with almost total extrusion of the intraocular contents.” Let us hope that the manufacturers of amateur sports equipment have read the March 1999 Archives of Ophthalmology and adjusted the hardness of their baseballs accordingly. Either way, eye protection for Little Leaguers is a swell idea.
* This was a joint effort involving the living and the dead, with the dead getting the shorter end of the stick: Following dissections of the dead penises. “10 healthy males” agreed to help confirm the findings by undergoing electrical stimulation of the dorsal nerve, as healthy males are wont to agree to.
* You are perhaps wondering, as I did, whether cadavers were ever used to document the effects of accidental free falls on humans. The closest I came to a paper like this was J. C. Earley’s “Body Terminal Velocity,” dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner’s “Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies,” from 1962, both, alas, unpublished. I do know that when J. C. Earley used dummies in a study, he used “Dummies” in the title, and so I suspect that a few donated corpses did indeed make the plunge for science.
* Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.
* This is no doubt why planes today are not equipped with air bags. Believe it or not, someone actually designed an airplane air-bag system, called the Airstop Restraint System, which combined underfoot, underseat, and chest air bags. The FAA even tested the system on dummies on a DC-7 that it crashed into a hill outside of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1964. While a control dummy in a lap belt fastened low and tight about it jackknifed violently and lost its head, the Airstop-protecte
d dummy fared just fine. The designers were inspired by stories of World War II fighter pilots who would inflate their life vests just before a crash.
* I did not ask DeMaio about sheep and the purported similarity of portions of their reproductive anatomy to that of the human female, lest she be forced to draw conclusions about the similarity of my intellect and manners to that of the, I don’t know, boll weevil.
* MacPherson counters that bullet wounds are rarely, at the outset, painful. Research by eighteenth-century scientist/philosopher Albrecht von Haller suggests that it depends on what the bullet hits. Experimenting on live dogs, cats, rabbits, and other small unfortunates, Haller systematically catalogued the viscera according to whether or not they register pain. By his reckoning, the stomach, intestines, bladder, ureter, vagina, womb, and heart do, whereas the lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys “have very little sensation, seeing I have irritated them, thrust a knife into them, and cut them to pieces without the animals’ seeming to feel any pain.” Haller admitted that the work suffered certain methodological shortcomings, most notably that, as he put it. “an animal whose thorax is opened is in such violent torture that it is hard to distinguish the effect of an additional slight irritation.”
