Failure™ Magazine

Book Of The Dead

“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

How did you get the idea for “Stiff”?
The idea grew out of a Salon.com column I used to do that covered health, the human body and the unexplored fringes of medicine. The columns about research cadavers were very popular and we were actually toying with the idea of doing something called, “The Dead Beat.” I started doing some research and then the entire section got cut when Salon went through budget cuts. But I had all this research and around that time I was talking with an agent. So it wasn’t a lifelong interest of mine. I don’t have family in the mortuary business and had really never given any thought to cadavers until I stumbled onto them.

When you were researching the book how did people respond when they found out what you were doing?
Writing a book on cadavers is a real conversation stopper. People want to be excited for you: “Oh, you’re doing a book? What’s it about? Cadavers?” People don’t really know what to say. The book is very hard to explain because people think it sounds dark and depressing. And I say, “No, it’s actually a fun book about cadavers.” Some people just don’t know what to make of that. So that was my least favorite part—trying to explain the book to people while I was working on it. Now that it’s out it’s a little easier.

What was it like to spend so much time around dead people?
It was surprisingly easy. Anonymous research cadavers are actually not that hard to be around, unlike the body of someone you knew or the victim of some horrible accident. Those kinds of sights are wrenching and emotional, but research cadavers are typically in the setting of a lab, they’re anonymous [and] you don’t get the feeling that their family is missing them. You don’t have any sense of their identity. They are just part of the experiment and more objects than people. I don’t mean that in a dismissive or disrespectful way but they are not people, they are the remains of a person. Also, their faces are often covered. In the anatomy lab I went to, a lot of the students left the faces covered. It makes it easier for them to cope. They are less human seeming when their faces and hands are covered.

It sounds really strange but I don’t think I’m unique in my ability to be around cadavers. I think anyone could do it. The exception was the head lab [a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course for plastic surgeons that utilized 40 severed heads, each in its own roasting pan]. That took some getting used to. Those were not covered and you could see where they had been cut off.

Was the severed head lab the first place you visited?
Yeah, that was the first thing I did. I was little concerned because on the plane on the way home I found myself looking around at my fellow passengers and thinking, “I know what you’d look like as just a head” [laughs]. I thought, maybe it’s not so good that I’m doing this. Maybe I’m going to go insane.

Did you have any uncomfortable encounters with cadavers?
There was this one guy who was the body that the students at the mortuary college were practicing on. His identification card was there. Standing around looking at this guy and knowing something about his past, it made me very sad. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just emotional. All the rest were so anonymous. But this guy I happened to know a little about and it just struck me as kind of sad in that way that death can be.

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