The feline passion for pyrophosphates might explain the animal’s reputation as a picky eater. We make [pet food] choices based on what we like, says Reed, and then when they don’t like it, we call the...
The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard’s textbo...
The 1940s was the heyday of pledges and oaths.* In Boy Scout halls, homerooms, and Elks lodges, people were accustomed to signing on the dotted line or standing and reciting, one hand raised. Even the...
Space agencies keep a firm grip on their public image, and it's less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what I write. Happily the...
Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Yo...
Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nitty-gritty.
Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere i...
PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. We need to know, says McCarthy. ‘Are you down because you don’t like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?’ Theresa...
Obsession is a pair of blinders, and Beaumont wore his tightly. He far overstated the role of gastric acid, ignoring the digestive contributions of pepsin and of pancreatic enzymes introduced in the s...
Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than that shapeless scrub so he coul...
Now she’s coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she’s going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth, he adds, and then he begins talking about some...
Nineteenth-century operating theaters had more to do with medical instruction than with saving patients’ lives. If you could, you stayed out of them at all cost. For one thing, you were being operated...
Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer. (Anatomy departments amp up the process by using greater amounts and highe...
Julie Rousseau said that the researchers told her they find some of her explanations far-fetched and do not consider the case closed. It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost comm...
How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up...
Given the complexity of the chore, escapees, as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring M...
Genetic differences in thermoregulation—efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it—are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fig...
For a cookbook, Apicius has a markedly gladiatorial style. Remove the entrails by the throat before the carcass hardens immediately after killing, begins one recipe.
For Arctic nomads, eating organs has, historically, been a matter of survival. Even in summer, vegetation is sparse. Little beyond moss and lichen grows abundantly on the tundra. Organs are so vitamin...
Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment—aka the Fletcher system. (Masticate all solid food until it is com...