DEAD MAN DRIVING

Human Crash Test Dummies and the Ghastly Necessary Science of Impact Tolerance

By and large, the dead aren’t very talented. They can’t play water polo, or lace up their boots, or maximize market share. They can’t tell a joke, and they can’t dance for beans. There is one thing dead people excel at.

They’re very good at handling pain.

For instance, UM 006. UM 006 is a cadaver who recently journeyed across Detroit from the University of Michigan to the bioengineering building at Wayne State University. His job, which he will undertake at approximately 7 P.M. tonight, is to be hit in the shoulder with a linear impactor. His collarbone and scapula may break, but he will not feel a thing, nor will the injuries interfere with his day‑to‑day activities. By agreeing to be walloped in the shoulder, cadaver UM 006 is helping researchers figure out how much force a human shoulder in a side‑impact car crash can withstand before it registers a serious injury.

Over the past sixty years, the dead have helped the living work out human tolerance limits for skull slammings and chest skewerings, knee crammings and gut mashings: all the ugly, violent things that happen to a human being in a car crash. Once automobile manufacturers know how much force a skull or spine or shoulder can withstand, they can design cars that, they hope, will not exceed that force in a crash.

You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don’t use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless. You first need to know, for instance, that the maximum amount a rib cage can compress without damaging the soft, wet things inside it is 2¾ inches. Then, should a dummy slam into a steering wheel of a newly designed car and register a chest deflection of four inches, you know the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) isn’t going to be very happy with that car.

The dead’s first contribution to safe driving was the non‑face‑gashing windshield. The first Fords came without windshields, which is why you see pictures of early motorists wearing goggles. They weren’t trying to affect a dashing World War I flying‑ace mien; they were keeping wind and bugs out of their eyes. The first windscreens were made of ordinary window glass, which served to cut the wind and, unfortunately, the driver’s face in the event of a crash. Even with the early laminated‑glass windshields, which were in use from the 1930s to the mid‑1960s, front‑seat passengers were walking away from accidents with gruesome, gaping scalp‑to‑chin lacerations. Heads would hit the windshield, knock out a head‑shaped hole in the glass, and, on their violent, bouncing return back through that hole, get sliced open on the jagged edges.

Tempered glass, the follow‑up innovation, was strong enough to keep heads from smashing through, but the concern then became that striking the stiffer glass would cause brain damage. (The less a material gives, the more damaging the forces of the impact: Think ice rink versus lawn.) Neurologists knew that a concussion from a forehead impact was accompanied by some degree of skull fracture. You can’t give a dead man a concussion, but you can check his skull for hairline cracks, and this is what researchers did. At Wayne State, cadavers were leaned forward over a simulated car window and dropped from varying heights (simulating varying speeds) so that their foreheads hit the glass. (Contrary to popular impression, impact test cadavers were not typically ushered into the front seats of actual running automobiles, driving being one of the other things cadavers don’t do well. More often than not, the cadaver was either dropped or it remained still while some sort of controllable impacting device was directed at it.) The study showed that tempered glass, provided it wasn’t too thick, was unlikely to create forces strong enough to cause concussion. Windshields today have even more give, enabling the modern‑day head to undergo a 30‑mph unbelted car crash straight into a wall and come away with little to complain about save a welt and an owner whose driving skills are up there with the average cadaver’s.

Despite forgiving windshields and knobless, padded dashboards, brain damage is still the major culprit in car crash fatalities. Very often, the bang to the head isn’t all that severe. It’s the combination of banging it into something and whipping it in one direction and then rapidly back at high speeds (rotation, this is called) that tends to cause serious brain damage. “If you hit the head without any rotation, it takes a huge amount of force to knock you out,” says Wayne State Bioengineering Center director Albert King. “Similarly, if you rotate the head without hitting anything, it’s hard to cause severe damage.” (High‑speed rear‑enders sometimes do this; the brain is whipped back and forth so fast that shear forces tear open the veins on its surface.) “In the run‑of‑the‑mill crash, there’s some of each, neither of which is very high, but you can get a severe head injury.” The sideways jarring of a side‑impact crash is especially notorious for putting passengers in comas.

King and some of his colleagues are trying to get a handle on what, exactly, is happening to the brain in these banging/whipping‑around scenarios. Across town at Henry Ford Hospital, the team has been filming cadavers’ heads with a high‑speed X‑ray video camera[12]during simulated crashes, to find out what’s going on inside the skull. So far they’re finding a lot more “sloshing of the brain,” as King put it, with more rotation than was previously thought to occur. “The brain traces out a kind of figure eight,” says King. It is something best left to skaters: When brains do this they get what’s called diffuse axonal injury–potentially fatal tears and leaks in the microtubules of the brain’s axons.

Chest injuries are the other generous contributor to crash fatalities. (This was true even before the dawn of the automobile; the great anatomist Vesalius, in 1557, described the burst aorta of a man thrown from his horse.) In the days before seat belts, the steering wheel was the most lethal item in a car’s interior. In a head‑on collision, the body would slide forward and the chest would slam into the steering wheel, often with enough force to fold the rim of the wheel around the column, in the manner of a closing umbrella. “We had a guy take a tree head‑on and there was the N from the steering wheel–the car was a Nash–imprinted in the center of his chest,” recalls Don Huelke, a safety researcher who spent the years from 1961 through 1970 visiting the scene of every car accident fatality in the county surrounding the University of Michigan and recording what happened and how.

Steering wheel columns up through the sixties were narrow, sometimes only six or seven inches in diameter. Just as a ski pole will sink into the snow without its circular basket, a steering column with its rim flattened back will sink into a body. In an unfortunate design decision, the steering wheel shaft of the average automobile was angled and positioned to point straight at the driver’s heart.[13]In a head‑on, you’d be impaled in pretty much the last place you’d want to be impaled. Even when the metal didn’t penetrate the chest, the impact alone was often fatal. Despite its thickness, an aorta ruptures relatively easily. This is because every other second, it has a one‑pound weight suspended from it: the human heart, filled with blood. Get the weight moving with enough force, as happened in blunt impacts from steering wheels, and even the body’s largest blood vessel can’t take the strain. If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole–blood‑squeezed‑out–portion of your heartbeat.

With all this in mind, bioengineers and automobile manufacturers (GM, notably) began ushering cadavers into the driver’s seats of crash simulators, front halves of cars on machine‑accelerated sleds that are stopped abruptly to mimic the forces of a head‑on collision. The goal, one of them anyway, was to design a steering column that would collapse on impact, absorbing enough of the shock to prevent serious injury to the heart and its supporting vessels. (Hoods are now designed to do this too, so that even cars in relatively minor accidents have completely jackknifed hoods, the idea being that the more the car crumples, the less you do.) GM’s first collapsible steering wheel shaft, introduced in the early 1960s, cut the risk of death in a head‑on collision by half.

And so it went. The collective cadaver résumé boasts contributions to government legislation for lap‑shoulder belts, air bags, dashboard padding, and recessed dashboard knobs (autopsy files from the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a few X‑ray images of human heads with radio knobs embedded in them). It was not pretty work. In countless seat‑belt studies–car manufacturers, seeking to save money, spent years trying to prove that seat belts caused more injuries than they prevented and thus shouldn’t be required–bodies were strapped in and crashed, and their innards were then probed for ruptures and manglings. To establish the tolerance limits of the human face, cadavers have been seated with their cheekbones in the firing lines of “rotary strikers.”

They’ve had their lower legs broken by simulated bumpers and their upper legs shattered by smashed‑in dashboards.

It is not pretty, but it is most certainly justifiable. Because of changes that have come about as a result of cadaver studies, it’s now possible to survive a head‑on crash into a wall at 60 mph. In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled “Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention,” Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three‑point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head‑ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.

Unfortunately, King did not have these figures handy in 1978, when chairman John Moss of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations called a hearing to investigate the use of human cadavers in car crash testing. Representative Moss said he felt a “personal repugnance about this practice.” He said that there had developed within NHTSA “a sort of cult that finds that this is a necessary tool.” He believed that there had to be another way to go about it. He wanted proof that dead people in crashing cars behave exactly like living ones–proof that, as exasperated researchers pointed out, could never be obtained because it would mean subjecting a series of live humans to exactly the same high‑force impacts as a series of dead humans.

Oddly, Representative Moss was not a squeamish man when it came to dead bodies; he had worked briefly in a funeral parlor before he entered politics. Nor was he an especially conservative man. He was a Democrat, a pro‑safety reformer. What had got him agitated, said King (who testified at the hearing), was this: He had been working to pass legislation to make air bags mandatory and was infuriated by a cadaver test that showed an air bag causing more injury than a seat belt. (Air bags sometimes do injure, even kill, particularly if the passenger is leaning forward or otherwise OOP–“out of position”–but in this case, to be fair to Moss, the air bag body was older and probably frailer.) Moss was an oddity: an automotive safety lobbier taking a stand against cadaver research.

In the end, with the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the Georgetown Center for Bioethics, the National Catholic Conference, a chairman of a noted medical school’s anatomy department who stated that “such experiments are probably as highly respectful [as medical school anatomy dissections] and less destructive to the human body,” and representatives of the Quaker, Hindu, and Reformed Judaism religions, the committee concluded that Moss himself was a tad “out of position.” There is no better stand‑in for a live human in a car crash than a dead one.

Lord knows, the alternatives have been tried. In the dawn of impact science, researchers would experiment on themselves. Albert King’s predecessor at the Bioengineering Center, Lawrence Patrick, volunteered himself as a human crash test dummy for years. He has ridden the crash sled some four hundred times, and been slammed in the chest by a twenty‑two‑pound metal pendulum. He has hurled one knee repeatedly against a metal bar outfitted with a load cell. Some of Patrick’s students were equally courageous, if courageous is the word. A 1965 Patrick paper on knee impacts reports that student volunteers seated in crash sleds endured knee impacts equivalent to a force of one thousand pounds. The injury threshold was estimated at fourteen hundred pounds. His 1963 study “Facial Injuries–Cause and Prevention” includes a photograph of a young man who appears to be resting peacefully with his eyes shut.

Closer inspection hints that, in fact, something not at all peaceful is about to unfold. For starters, the man is using a book entitled Head Injuries as a headrest (uncomfortable, but probably pleasanter than reading it).

Hovering just above the man’s cheek is a forbidding metal rod identified in the caption as a “gravity impactor.” The text informs us that “the volunteer waited several days for the swelling to subside and then the test was continued up to the energy limit which he could endure.” Here was the problem. Impact data that doesn’t exceed the injury threshold is of minimal use. You need those folks who don’t feel pain. You need cadavers.

Moss wanted to know why animals couldn’t be used in automotive impact testing, and indeed they have been. A description of the Eighth Stapp Car Crash and Field Demonstration Conference, which appears in the introduction to its proceedings, begins like a child’s recollections of a trip to the circus: “We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing…. We observed a pig, anaesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep‑dished steering wheel….”

Pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans “in terms of their organ setup,” as one industry insider put it, and because they can be coaxed into a useful approximation of a human sitting in a car. As far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of their intelligence setup, their manners setup, and pretty much everything else, excluding possibly their use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons, but that is neither here nor there. In more recent years, animals have typically been used only when functioning organs are needed, and cadavers cannot oblige. Baboons, for example, have been subjected to violent sideways head rotations in order to study why side‑impact crashes so often send passengers into comas. (Researchers, in turn, were subject to violent animal rights protests.) Live dogs were recruited to study aortic rupture; for unknown reasons, it has proved difficult to experimentally rupture a cadaver aorta.

There is one type of automotive impact study in which animals are still used even though cadavers would be vastly more accurate, and that is the pediatric impact study. No child donates his remains to science, and no researcher wants to bring up body donation with grieving parents, even though the need for data on children and air‑bag injuries has been obvious and dire. “It’s a real problem,” Albert King told me. “We try to scale it from baboons, but the strength is all different. And a kid’s skull is not completely formed; it changes as it grows.” In 1993, a research team at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine had the courage to attempt a series of impact studies on children–and the audacity to do it without consent. The press got hold of it, the clergy got involved, and the facility was shut down.

Child data aside, the blunt impact tolerance limits of the human body’s vital pieces have long ago been worked out, and today’s dead are being recruited mainly for impact studies of the body’s outlying regions: ankles, knees, feet, shoulders. “In the old days,” King told me, “people involved in severe crashes ended up in the morgue.” No one cares about a dead man’s shattered ankle. “Now these guys are surviving because of the air bag, and we have to worry about these things. You have people with both ankles and knees damaged and they will never walk right again. It’s a major disability now.”

Tonight at Wayne State’s impact lab, a cadaver shoulder impact is taking place, and King has been gracious enough to invite me to watch.

Actually, he didn’t invite me. I asked if I could watch, and he agreed to it.

Still, considering what I’ll be seeing and how sensitive the public is to these things and further considering that Albert King has read my writing and knows it doesn’t exactly read like The International Journal of Crashworthiness , he was pretty darn gracious.

Wayne State has been involved in impact research since 1939, longer than any other university. On the wall above the landing of the front stairs of the Bioengineering Center a banner proclaims: “Celebrating 50 Years of Moving Forward with Impact.” It is 2001, which suggests that for twelve years now, no one has thought to take down the banner, which you kind of expect from engineers.

King is on his way to the airport, so he leaves me with fellow bioengineering professor John Cavanaugh, who will be overseeing tonight’s impact. Cavanaugh looks at once like an engineer and a young Jon Voight, if that’s possible. He has a laboratory complexion, pale and unlined, and regular‑looking brown hair. When he talks or shifts his glance, his eyebrows rise and his forehead draws together, giving him a more or less permanent look of mild worry. Cavanaugh brings me downstairs to the impact lab. It is a typical university lab, with ancient, jerry‑rigged equipment and decor that runs to block‑lettered safety reminders. Cavanaugh introduces me to Matt Mason, tonight’s research assistant, and Deb Marth, for whose Ph.D. dissertation the impact is being done, and then he disappears upstairs.

I glance around the room for UM 006, the way, as a child, I used to scan the basement for the thing that reaches through the banisters to grab your legs. He isn’t here yet. A crash test dummy sits on a sled railing. Its upper body rests on its thighs, head on knees, as though collapsed in despair. It has no arms, perhaps the source of the despair.

Matt is linking up high‑speed videocameras to a pair of computers and to the linear impactor. The impactor is a formidably sized piston fired by compressed air and mounted on a steel base the size of a fairground pony. From the hallway, a sound of clattering wheels. “Here he comes,” says Deb. UM 006 lies on a gurney being wheeled by a muscular man with gray hair and rambunctious eyebrows, dressed, like Marth, in surgical scrubs.

“I am Ruhan,” says the man beneath the eyebrows. “I am the cadaver man.” He holds out a gloved hand. I wave, to show him that I’m not wearing gloves. Ruhan comes from Turkey, where he was a doctor. For a former doctor whose job now entails diapering and dressing cadavers, he has an admirably upbeat disposition. I ask him if it’s difficult to dress a dead man, and how he does it. Ruhan describes the process, then stops.

“Have you ever been to a nursing home? It’s like that.”

UM 006 is dressed this evening in a Smurf‑blue leotard and matching tights. Beneath the tights he wears a diaper, for leakage. The neckline of his leotard is wide and scooped, like a dancer’s. Ruhan confirms that the cadaver leotards are purchased from a dancers’ supply house. “They would be disgusted if they knew!” To ensure anonymity, the dead man’s face is masked by a snug‑fitting white cotton hood. He looks like someone about to rob a bank, someone who meant to pull pantyhose over his head but got it wrong and used an athletic sock.

Matt sets down his laptop and helps Ruhan lift the cadaver into the car seat, which sits on a table beside the impactor. Ruhan is right. It’s nursing‑home work: dressing, lifting, arranging. The distance between the very old, sick, frail person and the dead one is short, with a poorly marked border. The more time you spend with the invalid elderly (I have seen both my parents in this state), the more you come to see extreme old age as a gradual easing into death. The old and the dying sleep more and more, until one day they “sleep” all the time. They often become more and more immobile until one day they can do no more than lie or sit however the last person positioned them. They have as much in common with UM 006 as they do with you and me.

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren’t scary. The half hour I spent with my mother as a dead person was easier by far than the many hours I spent with her as a live person dying and in pain. Not that I wished her dead. I’m just saying it’s easier. Cadavers, once you get used to them–and you do that quite fast–are surprisingly easy to be around.

Which is good, because at the moment, it’s just he and I. Matt is in the next room, Deb has gone to look for something. UM 006 was a big, meaty man, still is. His tights are lightly stained. His leotard shows up his lumpy, fallen midsection. The aging superhero who can’t be bothered to wash his costume. His hands are mittened with the same cotton as his head. It was probably done to depersonalize him, as is done with the hands of anatomy lab cadavers, but for me it has the opposite effect. It makes him seem vulnerable and toddlerlike.

Ten minutes pass. Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there.

Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

Deb is back. She is checking accelerometers that she has painstakingly mounted to exposed areas of the cadaver’s bones: on the scapula, clavicle, vertebrae, sternum, and head. By measuring how fast the body accelerates on impact, the devices essentially give you the force of the hit, as measured in g’s (gravities) . After the test, Deb will autopsy the shoulder area and catalog the damage at this particular speed. What she is after is the injury threshold and the forces needed to generate it; the information will be used to develop shoulder instrumentation for the SID, the side‑impact dummy.

A side‑impact accident is one in which the cars collide at ninety degrees, bumper to door, the kind that often take place at four‑way intersections when one party hasn’t bothered to stop at the light or heed the stop sign.

Lap‑shoulder belts and dashboard air bags are engineered to protect against the forward‑heaving forces of a head‑on crash; they do little for a person in a side‑impact crash. The other thing working against you in this type of crash is the immediacy of the other car; there is no engine or trunk and rear seat to absorb the blow.[14]There are a couple inches of metal door. This is also the reason it took so long for side air bags to begin appearing in cars. With no hood to collapse, the sensors have to sense the impact immediately, and the old ones weren’t up to the task.

Deb knows all about this because she works as a design engineer at Ford and was the person who implemented the side air bags in the 1998 Town Car. She doesn’t look like an engineer. She has magazine‑model skin and a wide, white, radiant smile and thick, shiny brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. If Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock had a child together, it would look like Deb Marth.

The cadaver before UM 006 was hit at a faster speed: 15 mph (which, were this a real side‑impact accident with a passenger door to absorb some of the energy of the impact, would translate to being hit by a car going perhaps 25 or 30 mph). The impact broke his collarbone and scapula and fractured five ribs. Ribs are more important than you think.

When you breathe, you not only need to move your diaphragm to pull air into your lungs, you need the muscles attached to your’ ribs and the ribs themselves. If all your ribs break, your rib cage can’t help inflate your lungs the way it’s supposed to, and you will find it very hard to breathe.

It is a condition called “flail chest,” and people die from it.

Flail chest is one of the other things that make side impacts especially dangerous. Ribs are easier to break from the side. The rib cage is built to be compressed from the front, sternum to spine–that’s how it moves when you breathe. (Up to a point, that is. Compress it too far and you can, in the words of Don Huelke, “split the heart completely in half as you would a pear.”) A rib cage is not built for the sideways press. Slam it violently from the side, and its tines tend to snap.

Matt is still working on the setup. Deb is intent on her accelerometers.

Normally, accelerometers are screwed into place, but if she were to screw them into the bone, the bone would be weakened and would break more easily in the impact. Instead she secures them to the bone with wire ties and then wedges wood scrims underneath to tighten the fit. As she works, she slips the wire cutters into and out of the cadaver’s mittened hand, as though he were a surgical nurse. Another way for him to help.

With the radio playing and the three of us talking, the room has a feeling of late‑night congeniality. I find myself thinking that it’s nice for UM 006 to have company. There can be no lonelier state of being than that of being a corpse. Here, in the lab, he’s part of something, part of the group, the center of everyone’s attention. Of course, these are stupid thoughts, for UM 006 is a mass of tissue and bone who can no more feel loneliness than he can feel Marth’s fingers probing the flesh around his collarbone.

But that’s how I feel about it at the moment.

It is past nine now. UM 006 has begun to put out a subtle gamy smell, the mild but unmistakable fetor of a butcher shop on a hot afternoon. “How long,” I ask, “can he stay out at room temperature before he starts to…” Marth waits for me to finish my sentence. “…change?” She says maybe half a day. She is looking put‑upon. The ties aren’t tight enough and the Krazy Glue’s not crazy anymore. It’s going to be a long night.

John Cavanaugh calls down that there’s pizza upstairs, and the three of us, Deb, Matt Mason, and I, leave the dead man by himself. It feels a little rude.

On the way upstairs, I ask Deb how she wound up working with dead bodies for a living. “Oh, I always wanted to do cadaver research,” she says, with exactly the same enthusiasm and sincerity with which a more usual individual would say “I always wanted to be an archaeologist” or “I always wanted to live by the sea.”

“John was so psyched. Nobody wants to do cadaver research.” In her office, she takes a bottle of a perfume called Happy from a desk drawer.

“So I smell something else,” she explains. She has promised to give me some papers, and while she searches for them I look at a pile of snapshots on her desk. And then, very quickly, I don’t. The photographs are close‑ups from a previous cadaver’s shoulder autopsy: meaty red and parted skin. Matt looks down at the pile. “These aren’t your vacation shots, are they, Deb?”

By half past eleven, all that remains is to get UM 006 into driving posture.

He is slumped and leaning to one side. He is the guy next to you on the plane, asleep and inching closer to your shoulder.

John Cavanaugh takes the cadaver by the ankles and pushes back on him, to try to get him to sit up in the seat. He steps back. The cadaver slides back toward him. He pushes him again. This time he holds him while Matt encircles UM 006’s knees and the entire circumference of the car seat with duct tape. “This probably won’t make it into the ‘101 Uses’ list,” observes Matt.

“His head’s wrong,” says John. “It needs to be straight ahead.” More duct tape. The radio is playing the Romantics, “That’s What I Like About You.”

“He’s slumping again.”

“Try the winch?” Deb loops a canvas strap under his arms and presses a button that raises a ceiling‑mounted motor winch. The cadaver shrugs, slowly, and holds it, like a Borscht Belt comedian. He lifts slightly from his seat, and is lowered back down, sitting straighter now. “Good, perfect,” says John.

Everyone steps back. UM 006 has a comic’s timing. He waits a beat, two beats, then slips forward again. You have to laugh. The absurdity of the scene and the punch‑drunk hour are making it hard not to. Deb gets some pieces of foam to prop up his back, which seems to do the trick.

Matt runs a final check of the connections. The radio–I’m not making this up–is playing “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Five more minutes pass. Matt fires the piston. It sounds a loud bang as it shoots out, though the impact itself is silent. UM 006 falls over, not like a villain shot in a Hollywood movie, but slowly, like an off‑balance laundry sack. He falls over onto a foam pad that has been set out for this purpose, and John and Deb step forward to steady him. And that’s that. Without the screech of skidding tires and the crunch and fold of metal, an impact is neither violent nor disturbing. Distilled to its essence, controlled and planned, it is now simply science, no longer tragedy.

The family of UM 006 does not know what happened to him this evening.

They know only that he donated his remains for use in medical education or research. There are many reasons for this. At the time a person or his family decides to donate his remains, no one knows what those remains will be used for, or even at which university. The body goes to a morgue facility at the university to which it was donated, but may be shipped, as was UM 006, from that school to another.

For a family to be fully informed of what is happening to their loved one, the information would have to come from the researchers themselves, after they’ve taken receipt of the body (or body part) but before they run their test. As a result of the subcommittee hearings, that was sometimes done. Automotive impact researchers who received federal NHTSA funding and who had not made it clear in their willed body consent forms that the remains might be used for research were required to contact families prior to the experiment. According to Rolf Eppinger, chief of the NHTSA Biomechanics Research Center, it was rare for the family to renege on the deceased’s consent.

I spoke with Mike Walsh, who worked for one of NHTSA’s main contractors, Calspan. It was Walsh who, once the body arrived, called the family to set up a meeting–preferably, owing to the highly perishable state of unembalmed remains, within a day or two after the death. You would think, as principal investigator on these studies, that Walsh would have delegated the enormously uncomfortable task to someone else. But Walsh preferred to do it himself. He told the families precisely how their loved one would be used and why. “The entire program was explained to them. Some studies were sled impact studies, some were pedestrian impact studies,[15]some were in full‑scale crash vehicles.” Clearly Walsh has a gift. Out of forty‑two families contacted, only two revoked consent–not because of the nature or specifics of the study, but because they had thought the body was going to be used for organ donation.

I asked Walsh whether any family members had asked to see a copy of the study when it was published. No one had. “We got the impression, quite frankly, that we were giving people more information than they wanted to hear.”

In England and other Commonwealth countries, researchers and anatomy instructors sidestep the possibility of family or public disapproval by using body parts and prosections–the name given to embalmed cadaver segments used in anatomy labs–rather than whole cadavers. England’s antivivisectionists, as animal rights activists are called there, are as outspoken as America’s, and the things that outrage them are more encompassing, and, dare I say it, nonsensical. To give you a taste: In 1916, a group of animal rights activists successfully petitioned the British Undertakers Association on behalf of the horses that pulled their hearses, urging members to stop making the horses wear plumes on their heads.

The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces.

A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human leg has no face, no eyes, no hands that once held babies or stroked a lover’s cheek. It’s difficult to associate it with the living person from which it came. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It’s okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.

But let’s be rational. Why is it okay for someone to guide a table saw through Granddad’s thigh and then pack up the leg for shipment to a lab, where it will be suspended from a hook and impacted with a simulated car bumper, yet not okay to ship him and use him whole? What makes cutting his leg off first any less distasteful or disrespectful? In 1901, the French surgeon René Le Fort devoted a great deal of his time to studying the effects of blunt impact on the bones of the face. Sometimes he severed the heads: “After decapitation, the head was violently thrown against the rounded border of a marble table…,” reads an experiment description from The Maxillo‑Facial Works of René Le Fort . Other times he left the heads on: “The entire cadaver was in a dorsal… position with the head hanging back over the table. A violent blow was given with a wooden club on the right upper jaw….” What person who takes offense at the latter could reasonably be comfortable with the former? What, ethically or aesthetically, is the difference?

Furthermore, it’s often desirable, from the standpoint of biomechanical fidelity, to use the entire enchilada. A shoulder mounted on a stand and hit with an impactor doesn’t behave in the same manner, or incur the same injuries, as a shoulder mounted on a torso. When shoulders on stands start getting driver’s licenses, then it will make sense to study them. Even scientific inquiries as seemingly straightforward as How much will a human stomach hold before it bursts ? have gone the extra mile. In 1891, an inquiring German doctor surnamed Key‑Aberg undertook a replication of a French study done six years earlier, in which isolated human stomachs were filled to the point of rupture. Key‑Aberg’s experiment differed from that of his French predecessor in that he left the stomachs inside their owners. He presumably felt that this better approximated the realities of a hearty meal, for rare indeed is the dinner party attended by freestanding stomachs. To that end, he is said to have made a point of composing his corpses in the sitting position. In this case, our man’s attention to biomechanical correctness proved not to matter. In both cases, according to a 1979 article in The American Journal of Surgery , the stomachs gave out at 4,000 cc’s, or about four quarts.[16]

Many times, of course, a researcher doesn’t need a whole body, just a piece of it. Orthopedic surgeons developing new techniques or new replacement joints use limbs instead of whole cadavers. Ditto product safety researchers. You do not need an entire dead body to find out, say, what happens to a finger when you close a particular brand of power window on it. You need some fingers. You do not need an entire body to see whether softer baseballs cause less damage to Little Leaguers’ eyes.

You need some eyes, mounted in clear plastic simulated eye sockets so that high‑speed video cameras can document exactly what is happening when the baseballs hit them.[17]

Here’s the thing: No one really wants to work with whole cadavers.

Unless researchers really need to, they won’t. Rather than use whole bodies to simulate swimmers in a test of a safety cage for outboard motor propellers, Tyler Kress, who runs the Sports Biomechanics Lab at the University of Tennessee’s Engineering Institute for Trauma and Injury Prevention, went to the trouble of tracking down artificial ball‑and‑socket hip joints and gluing them to cadaver legs with surgical cement and then gluing the resulting cadaver‑leg‑and‑hip‑joint hybrid to a crash test dummy torso.

Kress says it wasn’t fear of public reprisal that led him to do this, but practicality. “A leg,” he told me, “is so much easier to work with and handle.” Parts are easier to lift and maneuver. They take up less space in the freezer. Kress has worked with just about all of them: heads, spines, shins, hands, fingers. “Legs, mostly,” he says. He spent last summer looking at the biomechanics of twisted and broken ankles. This summer he and his colleagues are running instrumented leg‑drop tests to look at the sorts of injuries that accompany vertical drops, such as befall mountain bikers and snowboarders. “I would challenge you to find anybody that’s broken more legs than we have.”

I asked Kress, in an e‑mail exchange, whether he has had occasion to wrangle a cadaveric crotch into an athletic cup and take aim at it with baseballs, hockey pucks, what‑have‑you. He has not, nor is he aware of any sports injury researcher who has. “You would think that… ‘racking’–i.e., scrotal impacts– would be a high research priority,” he wrote. “I’m thinking no one wants to go there in the lab.”

Which is not to say that science does not, occasionally, go there. At the local medical school library, I ran a Pub Med search for journal articles featuring the words “cadaveric” and “penis.” With the monitor shoved back as far as possible into the cubicle, lest the people on either side of me see the screen and alert the librarian, I browsed twenty‑five entries, most of them anatomical investigations. There were the urologists from Seattle investigating the distribution pattern of dorsal nerves along the penile shaft (twenty‑eight cadaver penises).[18]There were the French anatomists injecting red liquid latex into penile arteries to study vascular flow (twenty cadaver penises). There were the Belgians calculating interference of the ischiocavernosus muscles in rigidity during penile erection (thirty cadaver penises). For the past twenty years, all the world over, people in white coats and squeaking shoes have been calmly, methodically making the cut that dare not speak its name. It makes Tyler Kress seem like a cream puff.

On the other side of the gender gap, a Pub Med search on “clitoris” and “cadaver” turned up but a single entry. Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, author of “Anatomical Relationship Between Urethra and Clitoris” (ten cadaver perinea), bristles at the disparity: “Modern anatomy texts,” she writes, “have reduced descriptions of female perineal anatomy to a brief adjunct after a complete description of the male anatomy.” I picture O’Connell as a sort of Gloria Steinem of the research set, the fast‑moving, can‑do feminist in a lab coat. She is also the first researcher I’ve come across in my haphazard wanderings to have worked with infant cadavers. (She did this because the comparable male erectile tissue research had, for reasons not explained, been done on infants.) Her paper states that she obtained ethical approval from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology and the Board of Medical Research of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which clearly don’t go about their business with the grim specter of media evisceration foremost in their minds.