Summary Of Mary Roach's Book 'Stiff'

Stiff? Many ideas may pop in your head when you hear this word. Human cadavers was certainly not in the top of my list when I heard this title. After learning that this book was about the way human bodies are used after death, I was very hesitant to read it as I thought it would be very disturbing but. Mary Roach writes her book “Stiff” in hopes to transform the opinions of her readers over what you should do to your body after death.
Mary Roach introduces her book with the idea of “Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful?” #(1). Given this statement, we are given the impression right off the bat that Mary would like to donate her body to science and research. She gives us many valuable examples throughout her book explaining that donation of the body is very helpful in the medical and mechanical field and the army. Chapter 1 of this book talks about the ways cadaver heads are practiced on by many plastic surgeons. Plastic surgeons use these heads as a way to try out new …show more content…
When Mary talks about car crashes and using cadavers as test dummies, she fully supports it. She believes that is is for the better of many people that are alive to use cadavers to research how we can make cars the safest that we can. Mary states in this chapter “Representative Moss wanted proof that dead people in crashing cars behave exactly like living ones-proof that, as exasperated researchers pointed out, could never be obtained because it would mean subjecting a series of live humans to exactly the same high-force impacts as a series of dead humans.”#(93) Moss simply wants to save as many lives as he possibly can, and I believe that Mary fully agrees and supports his ideas. Mary wants to persuade her readers and encourage them to look at all the sides, good and bad, of donating your body to