Stiff - Mary Roach

   2003; 292 pages.  Full Title: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Medical Research; Death; Forensic Medicine; Science; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: “Best Book of 2003” by San Francisco Chronicle; “Best Book of 2003” by Entertainment Weekly; Amazon’s 2003 Editor’s Choice; and oodles more.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    It’s an important question that none of us ever want to consider: what is to be done with our earthly remains after we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil?

 

    For some, it’s simply a choice of being cremated or buried.  Both are expensive, neither is particularly eco-friendly.  The technology for a third option - composting -  is in the works, but it's not fully viable yet..  Once it becomes available, choosing it means you can help a rosebush or a tree grow.

 

    Becoming an organ donor is another consideration.  It’s a great idea if you happen to die when young, but is of diminishing value as you age.  Who wants an 80-year-old’s eyes, heart, or liver?

 

    So how about donating one’s whole body to science?  That sounds great, as long as you don’t ask: what exactly are the scientists going to *do* with my cadaver?  The general answer is: lots of different things.

 

    The detailed answer can be found by reading Mary Roach’s excellent book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

 

What’s To Like...

    Stiff is another one of Mary Roach’s one-word-title, research-oriented science books, this one with the overall theme of what happens to our bodies after we’re dead.  It opens with a 10-page introduction from the author, detailing her thoughts and emotions while researching Stiff, followed by 12 chapters covering all sorts of topics, namely:

    Ch. 01: Plastic Surgery Practice

    Ch. 02: Dissection

    Ch. 03: Burial, Embalming, and Cremation

    Ch. 04: Automobile Crashes

    Ch. 05: Plane Crashes

    Ch. 06: Bombs & Bullets

    Ch. 07: Crucifixion

    Ch. 08: Organ-Donating

    Ch. 09: Head Transplants

    Ch. 10: Cannibalism

    Ch. 11: The Compost Option

    Ch. 12: The Author’s Choices

 

    My favorite chapters are marked in pink, but frankly, I enjoyed them all.  Each one starts with an attention-getting photograph, followed by a clever title-&-subtitle, and seasoned with lots of footnotes that are both witty and informative.  This is my fourth Mary Roach book, and each one has been a enlightening experience.  Here, for instance, you’ll learn things like:

 

    History.  When dissection was a sentencing option.  How and when necrophilia laws changed over the years (you’ll be surprised).  What caused TWA Flight 800 to crash, and how they figured it out.  How they determined if the Shroud of Turin was real or a hoax.

 

    Medicine.  What a “flail chest” is and why it happens when you break your ribs.  What the maximum capacity of the human stomach is (it’s listed in the Guinness World Book of Records).  What a “beating-heart cadaver” is (my wife, who works in the medical field, already knew all about this).

 

    Chemistry & Engineering.  The four stages of cadaver decomposition (can we call it organic chemistry?).  What “plastination” is.  How gelatin is manufactured (my company was involved in that). The mechanics of a hit-and-run (you get “run under”, not “run over”).

 

    Weird.  Why guinea pigs were once subjected to a “vertical catapult” in the name of research.  Grave-sharing in Sweden.  Evidence that Thomas Edison was “loopy”.

 

    The book has an ending – somewhat unusual for a non-fiction “science-y” tome, and I thought it was deftly done: after all her research, Mary Roach reveals her thoughts about what to do with her remains when she departs this world.  I daresay you'll be surprised by her postmortem wishes; I was.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 3,947 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.05/5 based on 186,286 ratings and 14,365 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    In exchange for their experiences, these cadavers agree to a sizable amount of gore.  They are dismembered, cut open, rearranged.  But here’s the thing: They don’t endure anything.  Cadavers are our superheroes.  They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls.  You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them.  Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect.  They can be in six places at once.  (pg. 10)

 

    Intestinal gas is a waste product of bacteria metabolism.

    The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas.  The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not.  Cannot.  So the gas builds up and the belly bloats.  I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually.  He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off.  Or that there might be “something” blocking the egress.  Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart.  It needn’t be, but it can.  (pg. 66)

 

For a former doctor whose job now entails diapering and dressing cadavers, he has an admirably upbeat disposition.  (pg. 97)

    There’s really nothing to gripe about in Stiff.  The text is incredibly clean – I only noted a single “damn” in the entire book, and IIRC (I didn’t jot down the page number), it was when the author was quoting someone.  I saw only a single typo: “piece” instead of “peace”.

 

    I was impressed with the “tone” throughout the book: somehow Mary Roach finds just the right balance between respecting the loved ones who have passed on and the objective reality of subjecting the cadavers to all sorts of tests and analyses to further the knowledge in fields such as forensics, accident investigation, and anatomy.

 

    This is one of Mary Roach’s most popular books, and the high accolades it garnered are fully justified.  After reading this book you can’t help but ask yourself: what instructions, if any, should I leave for my own earthly remains?  Give it some consideration.

 

    9½ Stars.  Stiff was my fourth Mary Roach book, and I’ve yet to give a rating of less than 9 Stars for any of her works.  Two more remain in my TBR stash – Packing For Mars and Spook.  I have no doubt that they will be just as fascinating and enlightening as the ones I've already read.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

   1985; 233 pages.  Full Title: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Neurology; Psychology; Medical Science; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Quick now: what does the word “neurology” mean?  The logical answer would probably be “the study of the (human) nervous system”, and that’s close, but not quite accurate.  If you want to be pedantic about it (and of course I do), it is actually “the study of disorders of the nervous system”.

 

    Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was a noted neurologist.  Interestingly, both he and his brother suffered from a neurological disorder called “prosopagnosia” (wow, my spellchecker has no issue with this word), more commonly called “face blindness”.  He has been described as “deeply eccentric” (is that really a good thing for a neurologist to be?), and you can read his Wikipedia article (the link is here) for more details about his most peculiar life.

 

    He was also a gifted writer, penning more than 20 books, many of which focused on either his life or his work.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is one of the latter.  In it, Sacks recounts 24 cases involving 25 patients (there was one set of twins) who suffer from a variety of neurological disorders.  The titular case involves, guess what, prosopagnosia.

 

    It’s probably never a good thing to be unable to tell whether something’s your hat or your wife.

 

What’s To Like...

    The 24 cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat are divided into four sections, namely:

  a.) Losses (case 1-9).

  b.) Excesses (cases 10-14).

  c.) Transports (cases 15-20).

  d.) The World of the Simple (cases 21-24).

 

    The chapters vary in length, but generally are arranged from longest to shortest within each section.  The section titles are pretty much self-explanatory.  “Losses” means something’s mentally missing: memories, legs, half your field of vision, etc.  “Excesses” is the opposite: an overactive imagination, spasms, etc.  “Transports” send you to another reality: visions, music playing inside your head, etc.  “The World of the Simple” basically addresses the concept of Idiot-Savants.  Most of the chapters close with a “postscript”: either subsequent analysis by Oliver Sacks or feedback he received from other neurologists.

 

    My favorite chapters were:

01) The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

02) The Last Mariner

04) The Man Who Fell out of Bed

10) Witty Ticcy Ray

11) Cupid’s Disease

15) Reminiscence

20) The Visions of Hildegard

23) The Twins

 

    The book was a learning experience for me.  I came away with a much better understanding of things like Tourette’s Syndrome, Eidetic memory, and something German neurologists call “witzel-sucht” (“joking disease”).  I learned why you can’t lie to an aphasiac, and how you might quickly do amazing “calendar calculations” (What day of the week does October 4^th, 3681 AD fall on?), but had to google  the Latin phrase “vult decipi, ergo decipiatur” (“people want to be deceived, so let them be deceived”) because no translation was provided.

 

    I thought the neurological explanation for the visions of Hildegard of Bingen were fascinating; likewise the concept of “seeing numbers” (see the second excerpt, below).  FWIW, my “numbers-seeing limit” is 5, which makes the twins’ feat of seeing 111 matches simply jaw-dropping.  I chuckled at the mention of playing blindfold chess since I’ve done this in the past.  And it's always a treat to encounter the word “Proustian” in a book.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Anamnesis (n.) : 1.) a patient’s account of a medical history.  2.) the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence.

Others: Confabulatory (adj.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 3,402 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.05/5 based on 174,719 ratings and 7,053 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    He seemed to think he had done rather well.  There was a hint of a smile on his face.  He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over and started to look around for his hat.  He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on.  He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat!  His wife looked as if she was used to such things.

    I could make no sense of what had occurred in terms of conventional neurology (…)  How could he, on the one hand, mistake his wife for a hat and, on the other, function, as apparently he still did, as a teacher at the Music School?  (pg. 11)

 

    A box of matches on their table fell, and discharged its contents on the floor.  “111,” they both cried simultaneously; and then, in a murmur, John said “37”.  Michael repeated this, John said it a third time and stopped.  I counted the matches – it took me some time - and there were 111.

    How could you count the matches so quickly?” I asked.  “We didn’t count,” they said.  “We saw the 111.”

    Similar tales are told of Zacharias Dase, the number prodigy, who would instantly call out “183” or “79” if a pile of peas was poured out, and indicate as best he could – he was also a dullard – that he did not count the peas, but just “saw” their number, as a whole, in a flash.

    “And why did you murmur ’37,’ and repeat it three times?” I asked the twins.  They said in unison, “37, 37, 37, 111.”  (pg. 199)

 

If one asked such a patient to move his legs, he was apt to say: “Sure, Doc, as soon as I find them.”  (pg. 47)

    There’s a tiny amount of cussing in the book, mostly as direct quotes from patients.  The book is written in “English”, not “American”, but that didn’t make it a difficult read.  You just had to be ready for spellings like phantasies, chimaeras, phoney, smelt, humour, recognise, and the partitioned version of “none the less”.

 

    At 233 pages, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a short book, yet for me it was a somewhat slow read, mostly because it’s written in a “clinical” style.  I felt like the target audience was other neurologists, and Oliver Sacks expected to reader to be familiar with terms such as aphonia, aphemia, aphasia, alexia, apraxia, agnosia, ataxia, amnesia, athetosis, cerebral diplegia, aprosodia, akinesia, aboulia, adynamia, anergia, amusia, anosmia, and many, many more.  Neurologists apparently are nutso about naming disorders beginning and ending with the letter “a”.

 

    Despite having to decipher the technical terminology, I thoroughly enjoyed The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.  It’s got to be a lonely life when one is grappling with a neurological disorder.  I knew someone who struggled with schizophrenia; he described one of his attacks which ended up with him being subdued by the police and thrown in jail, with him having no understanding of what was going on.

 

    One last bizarre tidbit about The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat: It was made into an opera.  I’m not kidding.  Go out to YouTube and do a search for it.  Amazing.

 

    9 Stars.  We’ll close with a teaser, taken from the first chapter, which will give you some idea of what the patient (the guy who mistook his wife for a hat) goes through because of his disorder.  He was given an everyday item and asked to identify it.  Here’s what he said:

 

    “A continuous surface,” he announced at last, “infolded on itself.  It appears to have” – he hesitated – “five outpouchings, if this is the word.” (…) “A container of some sort?”  (…) “It could be a change purse, for example, for coins of five sizes.”

 

    What was the object?  Answer in the comments section.