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Mary Roach

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Paperback – 1 July 2004

by Mary Roach (Author)

4.4 3,814 ratings

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What happens to your body after you have died?

Fertilizer? Crash Test Dummy? Human Dumpling? Ballistics Practise?

Life after death is not as simple as it looks. Mary Roach's Stiff lifts the lid off what happens to our bodies once we have died. Bold, original and with a delightful eye for detail, Roach tells us everything we wanted to know about this new frontier in medical science.

Interweaving present-day explorations with a history of past attempts to study what it means to be human Stiff is a deliciously dark investigations for readers of popular science as well as fans of the macabre.

'Spry, common, sharp-witted survey brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Life after death"' Sunday Times

'One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year' Entertainment Weekly

'Every chapter packed with more arresting details elegantly humourously expressed than one can hope for' Sunday Telegraph

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin
Publication date

1 July 2004
Dimensions

21.6 x 13.8 x 1.84 cm
ISBN-10

0141007451
ISBN-13

978-0141007458
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Product description

From the Back Cover

What happens to your body after you have died? Fertilizer? Crash Test Dummy? Human Dumpling? Ballistics Practise? Life after death is not as simple as it looks. Mary Roach's Stiff lifts the lid off what happens to our bodies once we have died. Bold, original and with a delightful eye for detail, Roach tells us everything we wanted to know about this new frontier in medical science. Interweaving present-day explorations with a history of past attempts to study what it means to be human Stiff is a deliciously dark investigations for readers of popular science as well as fans of the macabre.

About the Author

Mary Roach is a journalist. She has written for Salon, Wired, GQ, Discover, Vogue and the New York Times Magazine. This is her first book.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1st edition (1 July 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141007451
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141007458
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.84 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 29,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 49 in Pre-clinical Medicine
- 78 in Teaching Aids for Geography
- 93 in Anatomy (Books)

Customer reviews:
4.4 3,814 ratings

About the author

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Mary Roach

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Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.

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Lauri Sim

A Fascinating Insight Into a World Hidden in Plain Sight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 10 July 2023

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For most of us, death is the end. Our loved ones pass, are buried or burned and we trim the grass, lay flowers and keep them in our hearts. However, rest and passivity are the last thing on the menu for the corposes in Mary Roach's funny and fascinating book. It is truly interesting and relevant now that discussions of alternative end of life is fashionable.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 18 February 2023

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A really fascinating read about the adventures of human corpses after there death like the corpse who went to the army and other stories about what these peoples bodies where used for after death a really good read couldn’t read it fast enough didn’t know any of these stories about the adventures of human cadavers even existed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 2 September 2012

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Mary Roach's theme is the use of corpses in scientific research. Their best known use is in medicine, where they are employed both as a teaching aid for students and a source of organs for the living. But they are also used by car engineers in crash tests, by the military to study the effects of weapons (and protective equipment), and by forensic experts investigating crimes and disasters.

Roach's style is not to provide to an academic, library based, review of previous literature. Her style is to go see. The book opens with the author attending a demonstration in which cosmetic surgeons are practising nose jobs on 40 severed heads. Later she jets off to China in a (futile) attempt to verify a story about alleged malpractice in a crematorium, and to Sweden to meet a woman promoting ecological funerals. It's a book with a large carbon footprint.

Her technique is to use jolly, frat boy language to present macabre material (Larf n' Barf, as it's been called). It's not to everyone's taste, although personally I like her sense of humour. The scene in which she asks a stony faced director of a Chinese crematorium whether one of her employees used the buttocks of cadavers to make dumplings is a virtuosic comic performance.

The one area in which I feel she strikes a false note is in relation to experiments on live animals. While I don't see any objection to using dead humans for scientific purposes, using live animals is a different matter. When Roach describes (with evident comic intent) some of the hideous experiments that have been carried out on animals, I felt that she had passed beyond an absence of squeamishness into simple callousness.

But I enjoyed Roach's account of the euphemisms of death. Employees of mortuaries are told to call a dead body a 'decedent', not a stiff, corpse or cadaver. A project using corpses to assess what type of shoes soldiers should wear to avoid getting their feet blown off by landmines was dubbed the 'lower extremity assessment programme'.

Of course, a corpse by any other name would smell as revolting. But some of the linguistic questions she discusses are more than merely verbal. In particular, how should one define death? As Roach points out, when organ donation became a medical possibility (in the 1960s and 70s) it was neccessary to redefine death as 'brain death'. (In effect, organ donation requires a situation in which a person's brain is dead but their organs are still alive.) Otherwise, surgeons removing the living organs from brain dead patients would have been vulnerable to charges of assault or murder.

Also thought provoking was her discussion of the ethical problem raised by the concept of 'informed consent' in giving the body of a family member to science. On the one hand, the idea of 'informed' consent seems to imply that the relatives should be told exactly what will happen to the cadaver. However, this may be needlessly distressing (the relatives might approve of the cadaver being used, but not wish to know the detail).

The final question she raises is the extent to which it is reasonable to seek to control what should happen to one's own body after death, one's funeral arrangements and so on. And how far should the wishes of the dead be respected? Elaborate stipulations as to what should happen after one's death might simply add to the burden imposed on others.

I listened to the recording of Stiff made by Shelly Frasier for Tantor Media in 2003. Frasier reads the book well, but I have two complaints:

(a) she misses out the footnotes (and some of Roach's best jokes are in the footnotes!);

(b) I wish Roach herself had read the book (she has a pleasant voice, and it's always good to hear the author).

9 people found this helpful

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Tracy Adam

Interesting and funny

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 9 May 2023

I enjoyed this book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 2 May 2011

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OK, as someone who takes an interest in the 'death industry' in general I didn't find much in here that was new to me but it was still a great read. Not that Mary Roach hasn't done original research of course. I find her writing very accessible and the tone light without becoming irreverant, sensationalist or flippant about a serious subject. A book that de-mystifies dead bodies perhaps can't help but seem a little blunt and insensitive since death is such a taboo subject, I think Mary Roach's approach is about right.
The book doesn't just cover contemporary death, either, there are lots of interesting historical facts. If anything I wished the book was longer and more in-depth - it certainly feels like an introduction to a subject that deserves further investigation. After all, disposal of our remains is something we should all really be considering. It may lack hard-science but that's ok, it's not supposed to be a textbook or a comprehensive guide to all things cadaver.
I've lent this book to friends and they've all said they not only found it informative and thought provoking but also an enjoyable read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 2 November 2016

Verified Purchase

Things I took away from this book:
(1) It's fascinating and often (more often than not in fact) quite funny, but it's also divisive, there'll be many readers who will have opposing views on the material it contains; no bad thing because it should open conversations and discussions about subjects that are little talked about.
(2) I want to leave my body to science if possible (and if required).
(3) I want as ecological an ending to my remains as possible if (2) isn't possible.
(4) Mary Roach must have had an absolute ball researching it, travelling to exotic (and not so exotic) places around the world and chatting with some wonderful characters from various fields of medical, scientific, military, and other careers related to the topic.
This brilliant book should be required reading on the curriculum at all high schools, colleges and universities to alleviate the discomfort many people have around discussing the end of life.
There should be TV documentary series made from it and educational DVDs released about it, it's that good, it dispels a lot of myths around many practices from the past and explains the laws and restraints that govern the use of the dead in modern times.
On top of all of that, it exposes the reader to cultural anomalies with regard to life and death, from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the USA.
It isn't exhaustive but it is in depth, it's extremely well written and brings some levity to an otherwise 'grave' topic.

36 people found this helpful

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Shona

Good read, very interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 27 December 2022

Verified Purchase

Good read, very interesting

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Marnie Riches

Fascinating - one of the most interesting books I've read in years

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 26 July 2022

Verified Purchase

I loved Stiff. I've been getting a little fiction fatigue, lately, and if you're interested in the human body or death (as I have to be for my job), this is a terrific read. Entertaining and full of bizarre and fabulous facts, I can't recommend this highly enough.

2 people found this helpful

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