Stiff

I first heard of Mary Roach sometime in this past year, when her book Packing for Mars was reviewed by the New York Times. The idea of space travel and an examination on all the details into it, and it’s a book that I’m very much looking forward to reading.

In the meantime, I picked up a copy of Stiff, Roach’s 2003 work that explores cadavers and everything associated with them. Roach has managed to take a rather morbid subject and not only make it interesting and readable, but very amusing at times.
She talks to experts across the world about various topics, including: dissection, autopsies, the various stages of decomposition and how they are used by forensic scientists in crime scene investigations, cadavers and their various uses in medical schools, how bodies helped reveal what happened to TWA Flight 800, ballistics tests fired into gelatin with the consistency of a human thigh and how organ recovery procedures are done. Roach is more than capable of addressing all these issues and supplements them with extensive historical information.

Perhaps the most interesting question is metaphysical. How do we define “death”? Legally, it is most commonly defined as the death of the brain. This creates a problem in organ recovery operations, considering that doctors sometimes have to remove a living, beating heart.

Part of this is a larger, metaphysical discussion about personhood and the concept of a human soul. Are you your body, or are you your thoughts? Which one is more likely to make you who you are and how you choose to identify yourself? I’m reminded of a film that we had to watch once in enrichment called Who is Julia?. At the time, we made relentless fun of the low-quality video and melodramatic acting, but maybe the ethical issues the movie raises will actually be valid in the future. If science someday allows full brain transplants (and perhaps the spinal surgery abilities will also allow transplantees full use of their limbs), what will happen to the recipients? What might happen to a brain put into a new body? Are you still you? How, and to what extent?

“You’re dealing with an operation that is totally revolutionary,” one expert says of a potential human head transplant. “People can’t make up their minds whether it’s a total body transplant or a head transplant, a brain or even a soul transplant” (p. 215).

One thing is for certain though: death does not have to be the end. Roach points out that there are over 80,000 people waiting for organs in the US as of 2003, with 16 of them dying every day (p. 195). The organ recovery which Roach witnessed saw one donor give their heart, liver and kidneys so that three other people could have their lives extended. I can’t think of a more significant gift than that of one’s organs – it is giving a stranger the gift of time.