Acknowledgements

People who work with cadavers do not, as a general rule, enjoy the spotlight. Their work is misunderstood and their funding vulnerable to negative publicity. What follows is a group of people who had every reason not to return my calls, yet did. Commander Marlene DeMaio, Colonel John Baker, and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Harris, I salute your candor. Deb Marth, Albert King, John Cavanaugh, and the staff of the Wayne State impact lab, thank you for opening doors that don’t often get opened. Rick Lowden, Dennis Shanahan, Arpad Vass, and Robert White, thank you for being charming and endlessly patient while I asked inane questions and used up entire afternoons of your time.

For helping make impossible things possible, I must thank the miraculous Sandy Wan, John Q. Owsley, Von Peterson, Hugh Patterson, and my pal Ron Walli. An especially warm thank‑you to Susanne Wiigh‑Masak and her family for putting up with me (and putting me up) for three days and nights. For sharing their time and tremendous knowledge, I thank Cindy Bir, Key Rey Chong, Dan Corcoran, Art Dalley, Nicole D’Ambrogio, Tim Evans, Roy Glover, John T. Greenwood, Don Huelke, Paul Israel, Gordon Kaye, Tyler Kress, Duncan MacPherson, Aris Makris, Theo Martinez, Kevin McCabe, Mack McMonigle, Bruce Latimer, Mehmet Oz, Terry Spracher, Jack Springer, Dennis Tobin, Ronn Wade, Mike Walsh, Med‑O Whitson, Meg Winslow, and Frederick Zugibe.

A big hug to Jeff Greenwald for the support and martinis, to Laura Fraser for her unflagging enthusiasm, and to Steph Gold, who spent three days of her summer vacation with me in Haikou, China, when almost anywhere else would have been more fun. I thank Clark for being Clark, Lisa Margonelli for making me laugh when all was darkest, and Ed for loving a woman who writes about cadavers.

Special thanks must go to David Talbot, brave and brilliant founder of Salon.com, for getting the ball rolling, and to my smart and outrageously good agent, Jay Mandel. To my editor, the gifted poet and novelist Jill Bialosky, thank you endlessly for your patience, vision, and editorial grace. Every writer should be so fortunate.

And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.

[1]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.

[2]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.

[3]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.”

[4]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.”

[5]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.

[6]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.”

[7]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 made 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.”

[8]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.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.

[9]And, alas, most expensive and least well attended. In May 2002, a year after I visited, it closed its doors.

[10]But by no means the first to attempt to keep bodies from rotting.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.

[11]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.

[12]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.”

[13]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.

[14]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.

[15]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.

[16]As fans of the eating sections of old Guinness books of world records will surmise, this figure has been surpassed on numerous occasions.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.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 .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.)‑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).

[17]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.

[18]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.

[19]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.

[20]Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970Aeromedical 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.

[21]This is no doubt why planes today are not equipped with air bags.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‑protected 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.

[22]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.

[23]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.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.”

[24]According to the Kind & Knox Web site, other products made with cow‑bone‑and‑pigskin‑based gelatin include marshmallows, nougat‑type candy bar fillings, liquorice, Gummi Bears, caramels, sports drinks, butter, ice cream, vitamin gel caps, suppositories, and that distasteful whitish peel on the outside of salamis. What I am getting at here is that if you’re going to worry about mad cow disease, you probably have more to worry about than you thought. And that if there’s any danger, which I like to think there isn’t, we’re all doomed, so relax and have another Snickers.

[25]Is it really blood on the Shroud of Turin? According to forensic tests done by the late Alan Adler, a chemist and a Shroudie, it most certainly is. According to Joe Nickell, author of Inquest on the Shroud of Turin , it most certainly isn’t. In an article on the Web site of the famed debunking group Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Nickell says forensic tests of the “blood” have shown it to be a mixture of red ocher and vermilion tempera paint.

[26]I read on a Web site somewhere that this was the origin of the saying “Saved by the bell.” In fact, by one reckoning, not a single corpse of the million‑plus sent to waiting mortuaries over a twenty‑year period awakened. If the bell alerted the attendant, which it often did, it was due to the corpse’s shifting and collapsing as it decomposed. This was the origin of the saying “Driven to seek new employment by the bell,” which you don’t hear much anymore and probably never did, because I made it up.

[27]Since the odds of our meeting at a cocktail party are slim and the odds of my managing to swing the conversation around to speculums slimmer still, let me take this opportunity to share: The earliest speculum dates from Hippocrates’ day and was a rectal model. It was to be another five hundred years before the vaginal speculum made its debut. Dr. Grigg theorizes that this was because, in the Arabian model of medicine followed at the time, women could be examined only by women, and there were very few women doctors to do the examining. This implies that most women in Hippocrates’ day never went to the gyno. Given that the Hippocratic gynecological cabinet included cow‑dung pessaries and fumigation materials “of heavy and foul smell”–not to mention rectal speculums–they were probably better off.

[28]We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing “My Liver Belongs to You” and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter . Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon , which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado , and bumper stickers would proclaim, “I [liver symbol] my Pekingese.”

[29]I’d never heard of him, either.

[30]No matter, for Whytt could have kept his appointment book full with no other patient besides himself. According to R. K. French’s biography of Whytt in the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine series, edited by F. N. L. Poynter, M.D., the physician suffered from gout, spastic bowels, “frequent flatulence,” a “disordered stomach,” “wind in the stomach,” nightmares, giddiness, faintness, depression, diabetes, purple discolorations of the thighs and lower legs, coughing fits “producing a thick phlegm,” and, according to two of Whytt’s colleagues, hypochondria. When he died, at the age of fifty‑two, he was found to have “some five pounds of fluid, mixed with a substance of gelatinous consistency and bluish color,” in his chest, a “red spot the size of a shilling on the mucous membrane of the stomach,” and concretions in the pancreas. (This is what happens when you put M.D.’s in charge of biographies.)

[31]What was going on in experiments like these? Hard to say. Perhaps the brain stem or spinal medulla had been left intact. Perhaps Dr. Redi, too, had his brain extracted from a hole in his skull the November past.

[32]People have trouble believing Thomas Edison to be a loopy individual. I offer as evidence the following passage on human memory, taken from his diaries: “We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca.’ …There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory…. Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.”

[33]Unless H’s family is planning a naked open‑casket service, no one at her funeral will be able to tell she’s had organs removed. Only with tissue harvesting, which often includes leg and arm bones, does the body take on a slightly altered profile, and in this case PVC piping or dowels are inserted to normalize the form and make life easier for mortuary staff and others who need to move the otherwise somewhat noodleized body.

[34]When he tired of moving organs and heads around, Demikhov moved on to entire dog halves. His book details an operation in which two dogs were split at the diaphragm, their upper and lower halves swapped, and their arteries grafted back together. He explained that this might be less time‑consuming than transplanting two or three individual organs.that the patients spinal nerves, once severed, could not be reconnected and the lower half of the body would be paralyzed, the procedure failed to generate much enthusiasm.

[35]Legendary for skewering heads of state, from Kissinger to Arafat (“a man born to irritate”). Fallaci stuck it to White by making up a name for the anonymous lab monkey whose brain she had watched being isolated and for writing things like this: “While [the brain removal and hookup] happened, no one paid any attention to Libby’s body, which was lying lifeless. Professor White might have fed it, too, with blood, and made it survive without a head. But Professor White didn’t choose to, and so the body lay there, forgotten.”

[36]As opposed to the mouse, horse, rat, goose, hog, sheep, mule, donkey, or dog variety. Dog turd was especially popular, particularly dried white dog turd, from which the popular Renaissance medicine Album Graecum was made. The Chinese Materia Medica includes not only dog turd, but the grains and bones extracted from it. These were trying times for pharmacists.

[37]If you could at all help it, it was extremely advisable, historically, to avoid being epileptic. Treatments for it have included distilled human skull, dried human heart, bolus of human mummy, boy’s urine, excrement of mouse, goose, and horse, warm gladiator blood, arsenic, strychnine, cod liver oil, and borax.

[38]While I am thankful to be alive in the era of antibiotics and over‑the‑counter Gyne‑Lotrimin, I am saddened by modern medicine’s contributions to medical nomenclature. Where once we had scrofula and dropsy, now we have supraven‑tricular tachyarrhythmia and glossopharyngeal neuralgia. Gone are quinsy, glanders, and farcy. So long, exuberant granulations and cerebral softening. Fare‑thee‑well, tetter and hectic fever. Even the treatments used to have an evocative, literary flavor. The Merck Manual of 1899 listed “a tumblerful of Carlsbad waters, sipped hot while dressing” as a remedy for constipation and the lovely, if enigmatic, “removal inland” as a cure for insomnia.

[39]You don’t see the Sims position anymore, but you can see Dr. Sims, who lives on as a statue in Central Park in New York. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up yourself, on page 56 of The Romance of Proctology . (Sims was apparently something of a dilettante when it came to bodily orifices.).S.: I could not, from cursory skimming, ascertain what the romance was.

[40]He does not use the word “autopsy,” for the prefix denotes a postmortem medical inspection of one’s own species. Technically speaking, only a human’s investigation of another human’s death can be called an autopsy–or, supposing a very different world, a sheep’s investigation of another sheep’s.

[41]In the grand scheme of industrial air pollution, crematoria rank low on the fret list. They emit about half as much particulate matter as a residential fireplace and about as much nitrous oxide as the typical restaurant grill. (This is not surprising, as the human body is mostly water.) Of greatest concern is mercury from dental fillings, which vaporizes and drifts into the atmosphere at a rate of .23 grams per hour of operation (about a half gram per cremation), according to research done jointly by the EPA and the Cremation Association of North America. An independent study done in England in 1990 and published in the journal Nature estimated the average amount of mercury released into the atmosphere at three grams per cremation–a notably higher and, the author believed, worrisome total. All in all, compared to power plants and incinerated trash, the dental work of the dead generates a small fraction of the planet’s airborne mercury.

[42]Frozen humans shatter easily because they are mostly water. How much water is a matter of some debate. A Google search unearthed sixty‑four Web sites with the words “body is 70 percent water,” 27 sites that say it’s 60 percent water, 43 that tell you it is either 80 or 85 percent water, 12 that say the figure is 90 percent, 3 that say it’s 98 percent, and one that says it’s 91 percent. A better consensus exists for jellyfish. They are either 98 or 99 percent water, and that is why you never see dried jellyfish snacks.Astorino, director of the Exercise Science Program at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, Maryland, was able to answer the question not only with certainty, but to a decimal point: We are 73.8 percent water.figure, he said, is calculated by giving a volunteer a measured quantity of water laced with tracers to drink. Four hours later, the subject’s blood is sampled and the dilution of the tracers is noted. From this, you, or Todd anyway, can figure out how much water is in the body. (The more water in the body, the more diluted the tracers in the blood.) Compare the water weight to body weight, and there’s the answer. Isn’t science terrific?

[43]And sometimes less. My business‑grade room at Gothenburg’s Landvetter Airport Hotel (“For Flying People”) had no clock, the assumption being, I suppose, that a businessman can simply consult his watch. The TV remote had no mute button. I pictured Swedish remote designers arguing quietly in their cleanly appointed conference room. “But Ingmar, why do you need a special button when you can just put down the volume?”

[44]If you live nearby, by all means donate. The Maxwell Museum holds the world’s only collection of contemporary–within the last fifteen years–human bones, used to study everything from forensics to the skeletal manifestations of diseases. P.S.:Your family can go in and visit your bones, which the staff will lay out for you, though probably not in the shape of an all‑together skeleton.