She has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is well beyond unpleasant. Your body is saying, ‘It’s not food, it’s cardboard,’ and...
Folk ballad about a woman named Daisy who is reincarnated as a medical student whose gross anatomy cadaver turns out to be himself in a former life, i.e., Daisy.
You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns—who have no teeth to protect—produce excessive volumes of drool. Silletti has answers. One is simple mechanics. They lack teeth to physically ke...
With charm comes charm’s sidekick, dilapidation.
When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It take...
We were unable to obtain any lesbians, Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn’t been in season, or his paperwork wasn’t in order.)
We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.
Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. What use, he replied, i...
Under the section heading Experiments with Human Subjects – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –
Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infect...
To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field’s history. Few sciences are as rooted in sha...
They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn’t support that view. If you look at a two-year mission...
There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.
The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile...
The terrier mix is named Alabama. His tail thumps a beat on the side of the crate. Alabama is a gobbler real bad, Theresa says. In making their reports, the AFB techs must take into account the animal...
The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd. Some of AFB’s clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble f...
The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don’t care what you chew. There is nothing remotely foodlike about superabsorbent cotton, yet the parotids gamely set to work. They are y...
People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’ Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or defects, in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavo...
People blanch to see fish meal or meat meal on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the w...
Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, old liquified placenta to qui...