Mary Roach's Stiff Analysis

Many of the actions that we do in our daily lives are pretty grotesque if you think about it. To live our lives as we do we need to acquire a certain mindset that keeps us from thinking about the facts behind it. In Mary Roach’s Stiff, she discusses how people adapt to dealing with cadavers. The way that they deal with cadavers is similar to how we deal with things in our everyday life. Roach often discusses how people that work with cadavers regularly psychologically orientate themselves to accept the gruesome nature of them. Everyday people do this with subjects that on the surface don't seem to be disturbing, but when you delve into the facts behind them, are very unsettling. Roach directly compares “dissection and surgical instruction” to “meat-eating” in that they both “require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial” (21). Meat-eating is inherently disturbing in that you are eating something that used to be alive. Personally, I was always disturbed with the idea that people nonchalantly ate meat and didn't think much about how it used to be living animals. Until I was around 10 years old I refused to eat meat because I was uncomfortable with that idea. I’ve always loved animals and have
Our culture as a whole adapts a personality that seems to completely ignore the ugly facts, and when this inhumane reality is brought up, people show sympathy, but do not do anything to change the problem. Western culture has mastered the technique of coping with unsettling deeds to the point where we do it unconsciously. We don't think of the bigger picture of what we’re doing because in doing so that would force us to think of the disturbing underbelly that may exist in what is happening. We often do not think of the people that are suffering as people and objectify