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Summary Of Stiff By Mary Roach

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This book adds a sense of truth to what happens when we die. It provides us with behind the scene information to help us learn and accept what we will become. In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach uses a humorous writing style with a curious tone in order to illustrate the medical perspective of life after death.
In the first chapter, the author is observing medical students dissect cadavers to get a better understanding of the human body, Mary Roach uses her curiosity to develop questions to learn more about the life of cadavers used for science. For example; Roach believes that this experience disciplines the surgeons because they are “[benefitting] from the chance to try out new techniques and new equipment on cadaveric specimens” (Roach 26). This quote shows that she is intrigued by the techniques and uses for medical cadavers. Roach is displaying respect for the cadavers being used to help inexperienced surgeons strengthen their skills. …show more content…

For example; Mary Roach does not recommend “[lowering] your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse...you can hear [maggots] feeding”(Roach 68). This goes to show that Roach is describing her whole experience as detailed as possible to educate others about what she is observing. The trip to the body farm provided her with information about how these cadavers can be useful for the police, FBI, and medical students. In addition, these cadavers are used to help “pinpoint how long a body has been dead and the effects of decay”(McCall). The bodies are put in different circumstances for a varied amount of time to see how the environment affects decay. Body farms are used to explore the stages of physical life after death and to educate those in the professional fields of body

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