My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.
Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased's ashes into inner space, that's fine. But if it's burdensome or troubling f...
Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden cle...
It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point
In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention, Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of...
I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. Don't say s...
Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory.
He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants’ hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. A whole new evolution of bone structure takes...
He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race, something ought to be done.
For two people so firmly distanced by class and employment structure, Beaumont and St. Martin inhabited a relationship that could be oddly, intensely intimate. On applying the tongue to the mucous coa...
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...
Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it’s impossible to know how to react.
During World War II, the U.S. military was shipping so much meat overseas to feed troops and allies that a domestic shortage loomed. According to a 1943 Breeder’s Gazette article, the American soldier...
Denis Burkitt, fueled a decade-long fiber craze. Americans were forcing down unprecedented amounts of bran muffins, oatmeal, and high-fiber breakfast cereals. Whorton cited a 1984 survey that found a...
Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don’t stomachs digest the...
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...
Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
Because it’s hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That’s a mistake. Langstaff
As the number of Inuit who hunt has dwindled, so has the consumption of organs (and other anatomy not available for purchase at the Igloolik Co-op: tendons, blubber, blood, head). I picked up the card...
As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars.