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Roach explored all of these unusual practices while doing research for her book. One of the most cringe-inducing places she visited was a southern university medical center. There, she witnessed a neatly organized row of 40 severed human heads -- which are the approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken, by the way -- resting face-up on disposable aluminum frying pans. The heads were not being used to perfect some pioneering life-saving procedure, but rather for facial anatomy and face-lift refresher courses.
All the heads belonged to people who had died in the past few days, which allowed for "fresher, i.e., unembalmed, samples. It's an upsetting and gruesome sight to behold even for some professionals, Roach wrote, so "physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were."
Although Roach is a firm believer in organ and tissue donations, after seeing surgeons perform nose jobs and liposuction on disembodied heads, she wondered if there ought to be a way for people to specify whether or not they want their remains to be used for cosmetic purposes. It's a particularly salient question when you consider that purified cadaver skin is now used in penis enlargement surgery. In a procedure called Allograft Dermal Matrix Graft, layers of purified cadaver skin are inserted under the penile skin and on top of the erectile chambers to give the penis more thickness. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that some guy's Johnson is a rather undignified final resting place.
Roach also paid a visit to Michigan's Wayne State University, which has been conducting "impact research" in the name of automotive safety since 1939. In the beginning, brave and insanely dedicated researchers put themselves through a series of masochistic experiments, which included being slammed in the chest by a 22-pound pendulum and having a metal rod -- with the benign-sounding name of "gravity impactor" -- dropped on their faces. Eventually, the battered and bruised researchers wised up, and decided there had to be a better way. While plain old crash-test dummies were useful, they couldn't relay specific information concerning how much impact real body parts could take, such as the maximum amount a rib cage could compress without causing injury to the inner organs. Or the amount of blunt trauma a human head could take before brain damage occurred. In other words, real bodies were needed.
So during the mid-60s, Wayne State University began using bodies donated for medical research for a variety of "human impact tolerance studies." Corpses, dressed in leotards and their heads covered in white hoods, were strapped into deceleration sleds and crashing automobiles, hit in the head with steel pendulums, sent through windshields and mowed down at mock intersections.
There was, as expected, some public outrage over these experiments, but researchers stressed that it was all done under strict regulations, and pointed out that they helped reduce the number of deaths and injuries on the highway. Today, the tolerance limits of the human body have been worked out, and dummies and computers largely stand in for corpses, although Wayne State still uses cadavers in select impact studies.
An impact study of a different sort was performed on human cadavers back in the early 1900s, but instead of cars, this experiment used guns and bullets. The US Army Ordinance Department suspended numerous cadavers from the ceiling of the Frankford Arsenal firing range in Pennsylvania. The swinging cadavers were shot dozens of times with a variety of different charges (to simulate different distances) in an experiment designed to test one of the Army's new rifles and its effects upon the human body.
The French and German armies had previously conducted similar "military wound ballistic studies." Ironically, most of these grisly experiments were carried out for the humanitarian purposes of creating a weapon that could effectively incapacitate the enemy without killing or maiming them.
Now it's a century later and similar studies are still taking place. At the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's Ballistic Missile Trauma Research Lab, cadavers were recently dressed in a new body armor vest and fired upon with a variety of weapons. The experiments were designed to test manufacturers' life-saving claims before outfitting real troops with the protective body armor.
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Wine & Paint @ Blackfinn Ameripub- Ballantyne
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Queen Charlotte Fair @ Route 29 Pavilion
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NEW WINDOW GALLERY-Pat Rhea-ACRYLIC PAINTINGS-April 05-30 2024 VALDESE, NC 28690 @ New Window Gallery/Play It Again Records
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Esports in Charlotte Takes Off: A Guide to Virtual Competitions and Betting
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Canuck in the Queen City 7
A Canadian transplant looks back at her first year as a Charlotte resident
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Homer's night on the town 41
If you drank a shot with the Knights mascot on Sept. 20, you were basically harboring a fugitive
