The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey,
You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.
What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company w...
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 gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been...
To Huang Ti’s credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that the blood of the body is under the control of the heart and that the blood current flows in a continuo...
Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don’t bend.
The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the du...
The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.
Taste—as in personal preference, discernment—is subjective. It’s ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It’s one part mouth and nose, two parts ego. Even flavors that professional evaluators agree are...
THREE FAMOUS ENGRAVINGS depict Alexis St. Martin in his youth. I’ve seen them many times, in biographies of his surgeon William Beaumont, in Beaumont’s own book, in journal articles about the pair. As...
Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the thre...
Stocks passed my e-mail along to Model Gut senior scientist Richard Faulks. Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibilit...
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.
Rawson has an idea of what it is like to eat without perceiving tastes, because she has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is we...
One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one.
One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail p...
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is i...
Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear...
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my...