Gulp & Stiff

One of my favorite non-fiction authors is Mary Roach, who writes popular-science books about somewhat taboo subjects, such as the digestive system (Gulp, 2013) and death (Stiff, 2004). Unfortunately, as you can see from the aforementioned publication dates, she lacked the foresight to write her books in the logical order. But that’s my only complaint about her wonderfully informative and funny books.

Like all of her books, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal is impressively researched through a variety of primary and secondary sources, including citations to such papers as “Paradoxical Sphincter Contraction Is Rarely Indicative of Anismus,” published in Gut; and “The Quality of Colonic Flatus Excreted by the ‘Normal’ Individual,” published in American Journal of Digestive Diseases. She reads these studies so we don’t have to!

Roach begins Gulp in the logical location, the mouth, which has just eaten a meal. Subsequent chapters then trace the route of food, which is soon a bolus, from beginning to end. Various questions along the way lead to various digressions:

·      “Is it possible to eat so much that your stomach bursts?” (Yep.)

·      “Is it possible to asphyxiate yourself from particularly noxious farting?”  (Nope.)

The book concludes with a look at recent experiments in fecal transplants to cure patients whose guts have been wiped clean of the bacteria necessary for healthy digestion. As Roach points out, sometimes the simplest, cheapest solution to a deadly problem is the best.

For a look at what can happen after death, Roach gives us Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which examines what happens to the bodies left to science. Some of these uses—anatomy classes in medical schools and crash tests for testing seat belts—you’ve probably heard of before, but she details some of the more obscure, sometimes outright bizarre uses for cadavers.

For example, Roach visits the “Body Farm,” at the University of Tennessee, to learn how cadavers, at various stages of decomposition, can help forensic scientists determine time and manner of death. One experiment might involve putting a nude body in a plastic bag and then leaving it in a car trunk in the summer sun and monitoring the number of maggots. Another experiment might involve putting a clothed body in a shallow grave and then regularly checking the chemical composition of the soil as the cadaver decays.

In other chapters, Roach writes about 18th-century French scientists who used condemned prisoners in an attempt to measure precisely the moment a person’s soul leaves the body and more recent Soviet scientists who attempted to reanimate the heads of cadavers. She concludes her book with alternatives to standard disposals of the body (i.e. burial or cremation), including a type of organic compositing that actually makes a lot of sense to me.

I can recommend two of her other books, as well: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2011), which is about training for a long-term adventure in space; and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), which is about--. Well, I’m sure you can guess its subject.