Have you ever heard a person say, “Donate my body to science after I die.” Well, the novel Stiff written by Mary Roach describes just that: how scientists utilize human cadavers for medical research. Each chapter describes a different aspect of how human cadavers are useful to science. Roach effortlessly describes how there is a purpose for bodies after death, in her interesting, unique, and humorous perspective. The novel begins with Mary Roach learning about how the heads of human cadavers are used for medical research. Roach attends a course where surgeons practice plastic surgery on the heads of human cadavers. During this process, Roach discovers that surgeons are able to view human head as an object, enabling them to be emotionless to any sort of life that person once had. It is clear that the author first realizes the importance that human cadavers have in the medical community. Due to the inhumanness of Cadavers: they are not living, therefore they cannot experience pain or death, like that of a living person. This means that cadavers act as a practice dummy for surgeons, before the surgeries of living people.…show more content… Due to the lack of human cadavers in Anatomy classrooms at that time, body snatchers would steal bodies from their graves and sell them for profits. This act emphasized the lack of respect that human cadavers received at the time. At the University of California San Francisco’s anatomy lab, Roach witnesses a memorial service for the lab's unnamed cadavers and is shocked by how respectful the students are towards human cadavers. Exemplifying how there is much more respect for the dead now than there were back in the “body snatching”
