Cadavers Quotes

“Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“Once a patient goes brain dead and relatives sign his organ donation consent form, he will get the best medical treatment of his life. A hospital code blue may be a call for doctors to rush to the bedside of a beating heart cadaver who needs his or her heart defibrillated.”
― Dick Teresi, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers--How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death

“[Davidson] Black procured cadavers for research, obtained from the Peking police department. These cadavers were mostly of people who had been executed for various crimes; the police regularly sent Black truckloads of the bodies of the executed convicts. Execution in China was by beheading, and thus the cadavers Black received lacked heads and had mutilated necks. After some time, he asked the police whether there was any possibility of getting better dead bodies for research - corpses that were intact. The next day, he received a shipment of convicts, all chained together, with a note from the police asking him to kill them in any way he chose.”
― Amir D. Aczel, The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man

“compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“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.....”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers