Quotes from Mary Roach

Zugibe's theory holds that the nail went in through jesus' palm at an angle and came out the back side at the wrist.

changes in the teaching of anatomy have nothing to do with cadaver shortages or public opinion about dissection; they have everything to do with time. Despite the immeasurable advances made in medicine over the past century, the material must be covered in the same number of years. Suffice it to say there's a lot less time for dissection than there was in Astley Cooper's day.

A technique favored by Mussolini's squadristi thugs. Political foes were force-fed large quantities of castor oil—up to a quart, according to The Straight Dope. Who does that? Moreover, why? To kill by dehydration? To humiliate? I could find no satisfying answer, not even from the International Castor Oil Association, which, despite large quantities of emails, had no comment.

But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.

I logged millions of miles with this body, and I hope you do the same with yours. The world is astonishing.

In attempting to cope with the shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection, instructors at British and early American anatomy schools backed themselves into some unsavory corners.

During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following

Presley was given laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. "I carried around three or four boxes of Fleets," Nichopoulos says, referring to the enema brand and recalling his days on tour with Presley. Getting the timing right was, he says, "a difficult balancing act." Presley sometimes did two shows a day, and Nichopoulos had to schedule the administration such that the treatments didn't kick in while the singer was on stage.

Taste is a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells. If you have hands for picking up foods and putting them into your mouth, it makes sense for taste cells to be on your tongue. But if, like flies, you don't, it may be more expedient to have them on your feet. "They land on something and go, 'Oooo, sugar!''' Rawson does her best impersonation of a housefly. "And the proboscis automatically comes out to suck the fluids.

But students weren't going to pay tuition to learn arm and leg anatomy;

I'll never know the particulars of what you'll be doing with my cold hull, but I trust it will be educational. All that is good and noble in this world begins with education. Learn well and live well.

All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. "Over the past eighteen years, every time," he told me, "the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom." In 2011, a Gallo cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom

Rawson has a colleague who studies crayfish and lobsters, which taste with their antennae. "I was always jealous of people who study lobsters. They examine the antennae, and then they have a lobster dinner.

Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, "that they didn't deliver jam to the moon." Bolte's

The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfish,* simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. "Catfish are basically swimming tongues," says Rawson. It is a useful adaptation for a limbless creature that locates food by brushing up against it; many catfish species feed by scavenging debris on the bottom of rivers.

Catfish are basically swimming tongues

The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off.

Qureshi adds that the other problem with government-controlled culling—referring here to the shooting of wild boar and nilgais—is that while it is permissible to kill them, the law forbids eating the meat. "And here"—he means India—"you don't kill a species for the sake of killing. Only a psychopath does that.

someone who knows a little more than diddly. I'm scheduled to meet with the Center's wildlife genetics staff, upstairs in the Long Speak Room, which is an amusingly apt name for a government conference room (except that it isn't—a realization that will dawn when I take note of the plaque by the door, which reads: Longs Peak Room).

Jan Bondeson collected dozens of them for his witty and admirably researched book Buried Alive.

It didn't bother them that the corpses would arrive at their doors, to quote Ruth Richardson, "compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,…trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams…

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 full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs.

People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises. Seventeenth-century druggist Johann Becher, quoted in Wootton, maintained that it was "very beneficial in flatulency" (which, if he meant as a causative agent, I do not doubt).

To me, ending up an exhibit in the Mütter Museum or a skeleton in a medical school classroom is like donating money for a park bench after you're gone: a nice thing to do, a little hit of immortality.