Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy command...
Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold th...
If you’re dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won’t help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them,...
If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole—blood-squeezed-out—portion of your heartbeat.
If you don’t have a pair of cadaver shoes, you’re not doing enough research.
I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.
Human remains dogs are distinct from the dogs that search for escaped felons and the dogs that search for whole cadavers. They are trained to alert their owners when they detect the specific scents of...
Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.
He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an ex...
Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.
For me, hands are hard. She looks up from what she's doing. Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back. Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that c...
Death doesn't have to be boring.
Caffeine is safe and effective but not without a downside. Depending on one’s sensitivity, it has a half-life of six to eight hours. Even if you have no trouble falling asleep after drinking coffee la...
But students weren’t going to pay tuition to learn arm and leg anatomy;
Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy.
At one chew per second, the Fletcherizing of a single bite of shallot would take more than ten minutes. Supper conversation presented a challenge. Horace Fletcher came for a quiet dinner, sufficiently...
Anne Marie's beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has miked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate--over two hundred millilit...
What she perhaps didn’t realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body’s erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in...
All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.