The Cadaver Who Joined The Army, By Mary Roach

Mary Roach, in her 2003 non-fiction book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, offers captivating insight into what happens to bodies once they are donated to science. Roach sheds light on the sometimes dark history of cadaver usage and medicine, raising important questions about ethical and moral concerns related to those actions taken for the sake of increasing scientific knowledge. From being used as crash-test dummies to practice for anatomy students to populating body farms in the name of forensic science, human cadavers have been put to use in many, and often shocking, ways. However, the general public is unaware of what happens beyond those medical school dissections and the extreme other uses--such as plastic surgery experiments …show more content…
She discusses in depth the processes used when testing these weapons on cadavers (and ballistics) and how ethics creates a barrier in further research with cadavers. Starting with the history dating back to 1892, Roach relates the story of Captain Louis Le Garde of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, who in 1893, was ordered to use cadavers to test two rifles: the new 30 caliber Springfield and the standard issue 45 caliber. She tells that after an experiment of shooting cadavers to test the physiological effect of different guns on the human body and how Garde influenced a movement on ballistics work on cadavers for a more humanitarian approach on gun battle. He proposed that stopping someone opposed to killing them was a better option, otherwise known as incapacitation. Another main point brought up in this chapter is the psychological theory- the idea that people who know they have been shot act more accordingly, falling the ground quickly while animals and some Native Americans can continue in battle long after being shot. Opposing the psychological theory, the neurological overload is also believed to be the reason of the stopping affect some people get after being shot or harmed. This is explained that the reticular activating system is to blame, when receiving signals of pain, it shuts certain muscles down (including the legs) which cause the collapse. The neural overload can also be caused by the "stretch cavity", the point of entry of the bullet in the body the stretch causes an overload in the circuits of the body, temporarily causing the body to shut down. Pigs are used for this research instead of cadavers for the ethical reason and also because pigs have very similar organ structure. To test this, scientists shoot animals until they stop moving and record levels of chemicals in the body. Roach also experiments with ballistics gelatin, a resource that