The experiment of body farm

Introduction

Roach indicates with regard to obtaining consent for organ donation, sometimes more information (like, that if you donate your body to science, you might end up a head in a tray for a plastic surgeon to practice a facelift on, or you might end up full of maggots in a grassy field) makes consent harder to obtain, and I can honestly say that “giving my body to science” never seemed so dreadful as it now does. (Roach, 265)

The experiment of body farm

The effect of reading Stiff might be lauding the unlauded: the people who donate their bodies, and the researchers who do the gruesome and difficult work of studying them so we can have better trained physicians, safer cars, and answers to important questions about what makes a plane crash or when a murder took place. After all, Roach refers to the cadavers are “our superheroes”:

They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on 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 six places at once. I take the Superman point of view: What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind. (Roach, 265)

But that can't be it, either, for a couple of reasons: one, Roach comes very close to making fun of these people and corpses herself (of corpses: “Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.”) and two, because the quacks, eccentrics, and sadistic researchers (the body snatchers, the creepy or greedy morticians, the guy who crucified bodies to determine whether the Shroud of Turin was a fake) get equal time with the good guys. (Roach, 265)

The word “dignity” appears fourteen times in the text (and in most reviews of the book, come to think of it). Preserving the dignity of the cadavers is major concern of many of the people Roach interviews. In Stiff's first, very compelling chapter (one that would work well for pre-med undergrads), Roach marvels at the dignity with which medical students and professionals treat their cadavers (draping their faces, naming them, moving their limbs with gentleness, holding a memorial service for them). But, in a later chapter discussing the environmental benefits of composting dead human bodies, dignity seems less important: To a certain extent, of course, dignity is in the packaging. When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. (Bass, 300)

And, indeed, Roach has already said of cadavers at the start of the book, “Their fundamental feature is that they lack dignity.” Roach seems very clear in the quote above — “you are a person ...