In an article about the controversial United
States "death tax" - an estate inheritance
tax - a political commentator pointed out
that it was a misnomer: only two per cent of
Americans would pay the tax, while 100 per
cent of Americans die. The second part of
that sentence sounded deeply shocking in a
culture where death is widely regarded as a
disgrace on a par with getting fired for
underachieving. Nevertheless human beings,
including Americans, continue to die with
alarming frequency: about 6,350 every hour
at the last estimate. All other
considerations aside, that's an awful lot of
solid waste to dispose of. What happens to
the stuff?
If you really want to know the many and
varied answers to that question, this is the
book for you. And no doubt many people will.
Gunther von Hagens' "Bodyworlds" show is
doing well globally, and many people must
have wondered when Damien Hirst was going to
stop carving mutton and move on to his own
species.
Besides, since the scientists keep telling
us that we are nothing but our bodies,
there's an understandable interest in
wanting to know more about the body's
ultimate fate. Unsurprisingly, it turns out
not to be pretty, whichever option you or
your loved ones choose. Stiff contains the
gruesome full monty on burial, incineration
and all other forms of corpse disposal, but
the real interest lies in the chapters
concerned with the increasing number of
people who voluntarily agree to donate their
bodies for medical and research purposes.
For a variety of reasons, most donors don't
stipulate precisely which purposes they have
in mind. Few probably imagine that they
might end up lying out in the open air in a
state of advanced decomposition so that
criminal-forensics researchers can advance
the state of that branch of science by
noting at what stage maggots start eating
the subcutaneous fat and the cadaver emits a
fart as the intestinal gas produced by
bacteria feeding on the enzyme-ravaged cells
of the intestinal lining is expelled - the
"bloat stage" - all preceding the final
collapse and liquefaction.
Would you like a side order of something
with that? Mary Roach has a ton of them, for
example the medical school in Maryland where
the heads of "decedents" (the preferred
term) are chainsawed off to be set in
roasting pans and used by trainee face-lift
surgeons to hone their skills. Warning: this
chapter contains scenes that some readers
may find disturbing; as does the one about
recently deceased crash test dummies being
beaten to a pulp to test the limits of human
impact tolerance; or the one about the
"crucifixion experiments", where corpses
were nailed to crosses in an attempt to
prove the authenticity of the Turin shroud.
In fact, pretty much the whole book.
Twelve years ago Bill Buford arranged an
introduction to the pathologist whom Ian
McEwan consulted for the cut-up scenes in
The Innocent, so that I could attend a
double post-mortem and write about it for
Granta. Maybe I'm just getting squeamish
with age, but I found reading this book a
lot more unsettling than that experience.
However, ploughing through these pages
concentrates the mind wonderfully, not
unlike the prospect of being hanged in a
fortnight. In my case it concentrated it on
the explanatory gap that philosophers call
the mind-brain problem. If we are in fact
nothing but our bodies, how can we care so
much what happens to them after death? And
if we're not, then what on earth are we? -
Dawn/Guardian News Service |
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