To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that...
To meet pets’ nutrition requirements while also giving humans the cheap, handy, cleanly product they demand, mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and...
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new h...
The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body.
The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant...
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.
The ducks of Mackinac Island are apparently not easily taken down. Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this an...
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that’s braver than it sounds.
Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Comi...
Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its sweetish mawkish taste and a smell peculiar to itself. To the doctor who is still strug...
People pooh-pooh Bud. It’s an extremely well-made beer. It’s clean, it’s refreshing. If you’re mowing the lawn and you come in and you want something refreshing and thirst-quenching, you wouldn’t drin...
People are messy, unpredictable things.
My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense...
It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty a...
In Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America, historian Alexa Green explains the men’s relationship as clearly one of master and servant. If the m...
I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.
Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus, but only the tongue’s receptors report to the brain.
Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make e...