HW # 52 - Third Third of the COTD Book

Precis:

Chapter 9 of Stiff begins in 1795 with Dr. Guillotin, the French doctor who lobbied for the use of the guillotine as a humane execution option, reading a letter that called it a form of torture. The reason that was given was that since the brain is the “seat of consciousness,” it is aware of its situation just after the big chop. This possibility led to a lot of experiments with recently severed human heads, with dogs’ heads and even to the grafting of a monkey’s head on to the neck of another monkey. At the end of the chapter we find out that there have not yet been any human head transplants. Not yet. Chapter 10 deals with cannibalism beginning with a 12th century Arabian custom of feeding an old man only honey before he dies and then preserving him in honey for a 100 years until pieces of him can be eaten to cure broken arms and legs. The honey recipe comes from a 16th century Chinese medical document that also had a recipe for “powdered human penis” to “ease the pain and put a shine on your mood.” It also talks about the artist Diego Rivera who said he ate fresh killed humans with friends for a month as an experiment, and they all felt great. Chapter 11 describes a Swedish woman’s development of an ecological burial that involves freeze drying the body so it can be used
as compost. A circle of life approach. In Chapter 12 I think about what to do with my own remains. Should I become a laboratory skeleton (getting the meat off is too disgusting), have my brain kept in a jar (more likely that it would be cut up in pieces and put in a refrigerator), or have plastination to preserve my body for 10,000 years (costs $50,000 and I would be naked). I decide that it is really the family members who
should decide because they are the ones who have to live with whatever has been done
with the person they have lost.

Quotes:

Laborde didn’t typically spend so much time personalizing his subjects, preferring to call them (recently guillotined heads) simply restes frais. The term means, literally, “fresh remains,” though in French it has a pleasant culinary lilt , like something you might order off the specials board at the neighborhood bistro. (p. 203)

Chong describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir. Examples for the Ming Dynasty were so numerous that Chong gave up on listing individual instances…In total, some 286 pieces of thigh, thirty-seven pieces of arm, twenty-four livers, thirteen unspecified cuts of flesh, four fingers, two ears, two broiled breasts, two ribs, one waist loin, one knee, and one stomach skin were fed to sickly elders. (p. 233)

Then one day I had a conversation with Phillip Backman, during which he mentioned that one of the cleanest, quickest, and most ecologically pure things to do with a body would be to put it in a big tide-pool of full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs. (p. 276)

Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are not longer around to reap the joys or benefits of the control. People who make elaborabe requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. (p. 290)


Analytical paragraph:

The last third of Stiff continues to explore the usefulness of cadavers as proof that our consciousness or soul lives in the brain and dies when the brain dies, as food or ointments for injuries or to promote health (mostly in the past), or as compost to help the environment. The composting idea from the Swedish woman environmentalist has the author’s approval because it is non-polluting and cheaper than cremation, and it is organic. The little freeze dried pieces of us are organic unlike our ashes and have “nutritive value” when they are used to help a plant or a tree grow. This idea makes me think of the book Pushed which makes the point that the birthing process should be more natural and less controlled by man and technology. Even though freeze drying is a process, it is a more natural one than cremation and being able to use the remains to make a tree grow is much more appealing than having a body slowly rot in an expensive coffin.