Decapitated Cadaver Heads: Yay or Nay

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

    I started reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach today (10/4) after deciding to take a rare dive into the nonfiction section of the library. I’m only about one chapter into the book, butI still feel like there’s enough for me to discuss in a short blog post. *Spoilers for first chapter* Basically, the first chapter is set in a surgical lab, where there are rows of heads for practicing face lifts. Roach discusses how she was brought in as a guest to observe, and tells about her experience meeting some of the surgeons. She also explains how there has to be a separation in someone’s mind between a person and a cadaver. Roach says that a cadaver is just a dead body, and whoever inhabited said body is not there anymore.

I’ve wondered for a while how people who work with dead bodies are able to continue focusing on their job despite the fact that there are, well, dead bodies. Roach expresses how she had to work for a long time to separate the two, and many surgeons, morticians, and others who work with dead bodies (even if it’s just for training) often struggle with the task. She says, “dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial” (Roach 21). She compares dissection and objectification of cadavers to eating meat, and how we rarely eat an animal whole, preferring smaller pieces called different names than the animal itself. For example, calling pig meat “pork.” I can definitely see the comparison here, and I’d never really thought before about what we call the meat we eat.

Along with the discussion of dissecting itself, Roach discusses where cadavers go and how they’re used. She explains that it’s rare for cadavers to get to surgical labs, because most go to anatomy labs first. Sometimes, surgeons will only get access to body parts if a cadaver was amputated, so certain body parts, like heads, are even harder to come by (Roach 26). Like Roach explains, many people want surgeons to have better access to cadavers. If you were to go into surgery, you wouldn’t want someone operating on you who has never operated on a human. 

The thing is, a lot of people who opt to be cadavers when they die don’t really want to be used to practice operations like plastic surgery. Roach explains that many people want to be used for ground-breaking experiments, but that can’t always happen. I think it makes sense that cadavers should be used for a wider variety of medical practices, because that way people can get used to what they’ll be doing to live humans. Also, operators have to be careful in labs like the one Roach is observing, because some people feel that what they’re doing is disrespectful. One example is how a few surgeons were taking pictures of their heads (Roach, 32). Some argue that the bodies cannot consent to having their picture taken, and therefore it’s rude to do so. I can see where they’re coming from, and I also find it a bit odd that people would want to take pictures of decapitated heads in the first place. So, whether cadavers are in anatomy labs or surgical labs or somewhere in between, they should be respected, despite the need to separate them from the person they once were.

- Ellix