Mary Roach's Stiff Essay

According to organdonor.gov, every 10 minutes, a new person is added to the organ transplant list (“The Need Is…”). That’s 144 people each and every day. With the help of human cadavers, those 144 people can be helped and be given the opportunity for a more prolonged life. Mary Roach uses her book, Stiff, to inform people of the impact that their body and organs can have on so many people’s lives. Mary Roach has always had an interest in science-related topics, whether she is experiencing it first hand or is writing about it. She’s had jobs that span from working in a zoo to being a journalist, but now she is an author who specializes in science and humor, which is very evident in her popular 2003 Stiff (“Mary Roach, Author…”). Her motivation for this book was to show her audience that there are more environmentally friendly and useful ways to dispose of your body after death than burial or cremation. With the use of witty humor, Roach persuades her audience to discard their ever-so-useful bodies in a more practical and helpful way, …show more content…
After answering “yes”, and explaining that the patient was alive, Roach finally begins to realize that the procedure is not crucial to the surgeons and does not have an immense effect on them. She uses a metaphor to explain how the nurse would dispose of any excess skin: “A nurse picks stray danglies of skin and fat off the operating table with a pair of tongs and drops them inside the body cavity, as though H were a handy wastebasket.” De-humanizing the cadaver makes it easier for the surgical staff to be taking him or her apart. They even go as far as to referring to H as a “this.” Mary Roach includes her dialogue with the doctor to show what it’s like from the doctor's point of view so that the readers can understand what were to be happening if they choose the path of organ