Quotes About Cadavers

I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician because, as a second job, my mother would clean up a pediatrician's office. So I was like, 'Oh, OK, baby doctor.' Until I got to college, and all the courses of science with the blood, guts and cadavers? I was like, 'Mm, no.'

Tómese un viejo castillo medio en ruinas. Un largo pasillo con muchas puertas, varias de ellas han de ser secretas. Tres cadáveres aún sangrantes. Tres esqueletos bien embalados. Una vieja ahorcada con varias puñaladas en el pecho. Ladrones y bandidos a discreción. Una dosis suficiente de susurros, gemidos ahogados y estruendos horrísonos. Mézclese, agítese y escríbase. El cuento está listo

I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!

And off we go, out onto the highway looking for a little fun. Perhaps a flatbed truck loaded with human cadavers will explode in front of a Star Trek reunion. One can only dream and hope.

Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.

For me, hands are hard. She looks up from what she's doing. Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back. Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain one's clinical remove.

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around.

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.

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.

What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)

cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs.....

Who's going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers. For this reason, anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public's mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally, as a punishment worse than death.

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.

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.

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…

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?' 'No, what?' I would say. 'A piece of dust.' Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I would say. "A piece of dust." Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

I'm really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—" she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—"and I may have become slightly distracted.

When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to sentimentality.

The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.

The gray mists and the grayer houses were full of the menace of memory: they were like traitorous tombs from which the cadavers of dead hours poured forth to assail me with envenomed fangs and talons.

Most of the people who are engaged in the subjects that I look into are pretty interesting. Whether its sex researchers or someone who's devoted their career to saliva or somebody who does research with cadavers, there's an inherent fascination in the subject matter of their work.

There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.