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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach · 4 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."― Entertainment Weekly Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers―some willingly, some unwittingly―have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.
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There's a chapter on this in Mary Roach's book Stiff[1]. The book was published in 2003, so this has been going on for a long time.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp...

michaelbuckbee
This book is great and I thought really respectful and interesting given the subject matter.
For a more varied look at what can happen after you die, I recommend the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1].

I think my favorite is to donate your body to a body farm [2].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm

Incapacitation is hard. The common belief that when you get shot you quickly go down and either pass out or are in too much pain or shock from the injury to do anything is pretty much a myth from movies.

There's some great information on this in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1]. Even getting shot through the heart often leaves the person several seconds where they are conscious and able to act, giving them enough time to shoot back or shoot hostages.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...

This reminds of when I read Stiff (an amazing book, by the way) [0], and how scientists in the good old days were weighing bodies before and after death, trying to find a weight of the soul, or any other quantitative values for the soul. I found that funny, but off-putting and disturbing.

My take: people are looking for any proof of the afterlife, holding onto a sliver hope proven by any scientific, factual account. I call the gamble on the afterlife faith, and why it cannot be guaranteed, but hey, that is way out of the scope of this conversation.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...

Gravityloss
If you really take the concept of a soul living in some astral dimension seriously, then performing experiments to try to pinpoint its interface with ordinary matter (the body) makes perfect sense.

If you're not interested in getting experimental evidence for your idea, whatever it might be, it could be that you don't even believe there is any. Maybe you actually think the idea isn't even true in the literal sense.

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