Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]. Beaumont was...
For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.
Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it’s the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an...
Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by life units, smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated aro...
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. But the men wanted something they could chew, something into...
Another strategy was to target kids. The human infant enters the world without information about what is edible and what is not, wrote psychologist Paul Rozin, who studied disgust for many years at th...
Plays a game with his wine-marketing classes at Napa Valley College. The students, most of whom have several years’ experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by—a ni...
Freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer.
You mean like a small silicone breast implant? I wasn’t actually thinking that, but sure.
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 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.
There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved...
The question Which beer do you want, Mary? went down at the end. When she puts her nose to a glass, though, something switches on. She sits straighter and her words come out faster, lit by interest an...
The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identi...
The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to d...
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...
THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. We’re basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract, Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the...