Mary Roach

The author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and many other books, Roach is a former travel writer who, having been everywhere, “began to look for foreign lands between the cracks.” As a journalist, she considers herself a voyeur, naturally curious and drawn to what fascinates her. She revels in the foreign world of science, and particularly in the “strange and, in its repellent way, enticing” science of the dead.

Ronn Wade

Wade is in charge of the anatomical gifts program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He believes that “live surgery is the worst place for a surgeon to be practicing a new skill.” The trouble, however, is that medical school anatomy departments are entitled to the majority of available cadavers, which makes it difficult for licensed physicians to practice new techniques. Wade arranges cadaver lab seminars for Baltimore-area surgeons who wish to first perform unfamiliar procedures on willed bodies rather than live patients.

Roach is surprised when Wade informs her that even surgical residents have limited access to donated cadavers: they learn by watching their attending, assisting with simple skills, and graduating to full procedures. “It’s basically on-the-job training,” according to Wade. He hopes to change this.

Robert Knox

Knox was a nineteenth-century Scottish anatomist who “instigated anatomy’s fatal PR blunder: the implicit sanctioning of murder for medicine.” Like many physicians of his era, Knox had difficulty legally obtaining cadavers on which to practice. The growing number of medical schools and medical students outpaced the number of bodies available for dissection. Until 1836, the only cadavers on the market belonged to murderers who had been executed. Although there was no explicit law against donation, no one willed their body to science. To be resurrected, it was believed, one’s body must remain relatively intact after death. It is therefore unlikely that Knox believed the strange men who showed up on his doorstep to sell a “donated” corpse; nevertheless, he accepted the body delivered by Messrs. Burke and Hare, as well as the next sixteen they brought him.

The pair was eventually caught for what had become a profitable murder scheme: suffocating vulnerable lodgers in Hare’s boardinghouse and selling their bodies to Knox. Hare was granted immunity, but Burke was hanged for his crimes and, as a murderer, was summarily dissected. Knox was never charged for his role, but the public held him morally accountable for overlooking the obvious signs of trauma to the bodies. An effigy of Knox was hung in front of his home with a placard reading “Knox, the associate of the infamous Hare.”

Arpad Vass

Vass is an adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee (UT) and a senior staff scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). UT and ORNL work together to study tissue decomposition under a variety of conditions—that is, conditions most commonly associated with the illegal disposal of human bodies. At the UT Forensic Anthropology Center, cadavers are buried in shallow graves, encased in concrete, stuffed into trunks or plastic bags, or sunk in ponds. ORNL maintains a database of tissue samples taken from the cadavers at various stages of decomposition. Vass’s project uses these expected decay profiles to determine a person’s time of death.

Vass takes Roach on a tour of UT’s facilities, explaining the biological processes at each stage of decomposition. In addition to approximate time of death, Vass can tell if a body has been moved based on its degree of dissolution into the surface beneath it. Roach uses her experience with the sights—and smells—of human decomposition to argue that people in Robert...