Mary Roach: Book Summary

Mary Roach begins this book on human remains with a facial anatomy course, where surgeons are practicing facelifts on severed heads of the recently dead. She discusses how the surgeons cope with the dead by objectifying the remains, seeing them as objects to get past the dead part. Roach sees the good in learning surgical techniques using bodies. Because they feel nothing and can’t die any more than they are already, remains offer a clean canvas for surgical study. She sees this to be an improvement over how the practice used to be taught on patients who were both alive and awake.

Roach visits an anatomy lab at UCSF where she attends an odd service for the lab's unnamed bodies and is in awe of the respect the students have for the bodies. …show more content…
Despite being a debated topic, bodies have made an impact in car safety, particularly with steering wheels and windshields. Later, Roach mets with one analyst who looked into the crash of TWA flight 800. From this, she learns how injuries on dead passengers can portray what happened before an air disaster such as a plane crash.

Roach observes the way cadavers are used to study weaponry as well. Although society frowns heavily on this, she sees that such research can be done for humanitarian reasons. She is less impressed when bodies are used to promote religions, such as the work done to prove the legitimacy of the Shroud of Turin. At UCSF medical center Roach is put in awe by the sight of a "beating heart cadaver" where organs removed by doctors are still in a functioning state.

In a later chapter Roach talks about the soul, looking at head transplants, decapitation, and reanimation, as well as how these could alter the view of where the soul lies. She touches on the French revolution before moving to animal experiments in modern neurosurgery. She then considers medicinal cannibalism, looking at historical examples of how and why humans have eaten one another. She takes a trip to China to investigate a particularly morbid

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Mary Roach: Book Summary

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