Human Shocks & Shrouds

[David Morris]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/bookreview.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-07-12&id=1661

Mary Roach’s book is mostly about the uses to which human corpses are sometimes
put. People who leave their bodies to science don’t necessarily know what
science they are leaving their bodies to, and might be less keen to do so if
they did know: ballistics, for example, in which bullets are fired into bodies
at various distances and angles. Making a better bullet is probably not what
most people had in mind while philanthropically assigning their mortal remains
to science. 

Some corpses are put in car- crash simulators; others are buried in fields or
forests to help forensic scientists learn about rates of decay in different
climates and soils. Severed heads are used to teach new surgical techniques to
cosmetic surgeons, or to learn about the injuries to be expected when an eye is
struck with a baseball. A Swedish ecologist and entrepreneur called Susanne
Wiigh-Masak has started a movement and a company to promote the use of human
remains as compost: corpses will be freeze-dried and then pounded by ultrasound
waves into little compost-sized chunks that can be used to fertilise memorial
rose bushes as well as commercial crops. This idea has caught on among Sweden’s
post-religious, neo-pagan population: deliberately recycling one’s nitrogen in
useful or beautiful plants appeals both to the rationalist and the mystic in
them. 


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