HW 50 - First Third of Care-of-the-Dead Book Post

Stiff by Mary Roach

Precis:

The title of the chapter is “A head is a terrible thing to waste.” An important principle we have always been taught is to have respect for the dead. Cadavers (parts of the human body used for dissection) are used for surgical procedures such as face lifts, nose jobs, and other cosmetic surgeries. The chapter also gives the history of human bodies regarding the poor being exploited at research hospitals, when the first dissections took place, and doctor’s experiences with surgery.

Quotes:

“The surgeons don’t seem queasy or repulsed, though Theresa told me later that one of them had to leave the room. “They hate it,” she says. “It” meaning working with heads. I sense from them only a mild discomfort with their task. As I stop at their tables to watch, they turn to me with a vaguely irritated, embarrassed look. You’ve seen that look if you make a habit of entering bathrooms without knocking. The look says, please go away.” (Stiff, Pg. 23).

“I was surprised to learn that even when surgeons are in residencies, they aren’t typically given an opportunity to practice operations on donated cadavers” (Stiff, Pg. 27).

“Without exception, the only people who checked themselves in at teaching hospitals were those too poor to pay for private surgery” (Stiff, Pg. 30).

“They should probably just ask for permission: According to New England Journal of Medicine study on the subject, 73 percent of parents of newly dead children, when asked, gave consent to use their child’s body for teaching intubation skills” (Stiff, Pg. 32).

“The far more common tactic was to sneak into a graveyard and dig up someone else’s relative to stuffy. The act became known as body snatching” (Stiff, Pg. 43).

Analytical Paragraph:

The beginning of the book presented information about a human head then used that to describe that she was looking at an actual head. It was interesting that when Mary was looking around at the different tables while people were dissecting faces, the surgeons were giving her dirty looks because they obviously felt uncomfortable with her seeing them handle heads. It’s ironic that the woman cutting off people’s heads was the one that gave her the most trouble when she was simply looking for information about the nature of their work. An idea that was also presented in the book was the issue of consent. I think that if there was a form where you were allowed to indicate whether or not your remains were donated after your burial it would make things much easier. Even if they are dead you have to consider what they would have wanted if they were alive. I thought the dead were respected but people were paid to dig up bodies for research studies, and body snatching was an actual crime. I did not know or even think about it before.