Mary Roach's The Curious Life Of Human Cadaver

I enjoyed reading The Curious Life of Human Cadavers much more than I initially thought I would. I am a naturally squeamish person, and while I still am, I believe the topic of cadavers and death was handled extremely well throughout most of the book. To memory there are only a few moments in the book when I felt grossed out, in particular when Mary Roach visited the school that was undergoing research on how bodies decay, I felt that including the details of the bacteria that were eating the bodies was important to a degree, but nonetheless made me uncomfortable. Aside from that one point none of the other details, whether intentionally gross or indirectly, made me feel queasy. One of my favorite parts about the book was that it didn’t solely
For example, the crash test cadaver in a leotard and diaper. This is outweighed by the fact that the people performing research maintain a deep respect for the dead while simultaneously not humanizing the cadaver, to remain sane. The book had a good pace that built upon itself establishing precedents and contrasting them to past uses of cadavers to ease into the idea that the treatment of corpses now is immaculate compared to the 18th century. The first chapter, about the head and its use in surgery practice, was a nice way to ease into the not often thought about uses for cadavers. This chapter also established that cadavers were respected deeply by the people that use them. Following this chapter Roach explains the gruesome history of how cadavers were obtained before it was widely accepted or legal to donate your body to science, this was a good way to make current day researchers appear much less brutal. The next to chapter talked about more uses for cadavers such as the crash dummy and the bodies decaying for the purpose of research on human decay furthering my knowledge on cadavers and their true