Quotes from Mary Roach

If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole—blood-squeezed-out—portion of your heartbeat.

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even.

One's own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one.

What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I'd stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.

Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) Space

The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.

Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C. Path. (Lond.), F.F. Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G." Who knows, perhaps history erred in bestowing upon Hippocrates the title Father of Medicine.

Hippocrates took the no doubt breakfast-inspired view that the egg was simply something for the developing human to eat. He further speculated that as soon as the egg was all eaten up, then the infant would hatch: birth as a sort of grocery-shopping trip.)

Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).

Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at—fill my heart with joy!—Ball State University.

If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospitals every day.

He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard.

Another group tried putting a new type of protective boot onto the hind leg of a mule deer for testing. Given that deer lack toes and heels and people lack hooves, and that no country I know of employs mule deer in land mine clearance, it is hard—though mildly entertaining—to try to imagine what the value of such a study could have been.

Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation" is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts.

Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association.

Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, "The possibility of reuse must be considered." Sometime

What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.

To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category "unthinkable to eat." The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.

it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation's Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club. Stine

You mean like a small silicone breast implant?" I wasn't actually thinking that, but sure.

The human liver is a boss-looking organ.

The question then becomes, was it necessary, once the likes of Vesalius had pretty much figured out the basics, for every student of anatomy to get right in there and figure them out all over again? Why couldn't models and preserved prosections be used to teach anatomy? Do gross anatomy labs reinvent the wheel? The questions were especially relevant in Knox's day, given the way in which bodies were procured, but they are still relevant today.