Valet Reader

Stiff by Mary Roach

I was supposed to return to the United States today. I’m not.

Every now and then I get one of those cheesy “out of body” type sensations. At the moment I´m kind of dealing with that sensation. At this exact moment I´m physically on a bart train riding to the airport to begin my Colombian vacation. Mentally and existentially i´m anywhere but. I should be ecstatic, I should be thrilled and I should be full of adrenaline. Instead, I feel like a submarine that has just received a fatal, sinking blow from an enemy torpedo. That pretty much sums up the sensation I´m feeling at the moment.

It´s as though I´m looking down upon my dead and bloated body (I know, awesome image right?) right now. It´s amazing how quickly I’ve gone from feeling so alive to feeling so empty and dead.

I had great expectations that while I would be gone all the pieces of my life that I had been hoping to fall into place would. Instead, only 30 minutes before leaving for the airport, a person who I would say has grown to be one of my closest friends over the last 3 months told me that she really didn´t think it was a good idea that we continue to talk. In a way her reasoning may be right and I can´t or couldn´t argue with her, but it also left me heartbroken. Like I said, not exactly how I imagine feeling on my way to the airport.

It´s never been hard for me to correlate what I´m reading with what´s going on directly around me. Sometimes it´s a stretch (I`ll admit it) but other times it´s just a plain old coincidence. In this instance it´s half stretch, half coincidence. Stiff, you see, is about cadavers or dead bodies for those of you who live on mars.

But in an effort to turn things around (from that bizarre “out of body” sensation) I´ll start telling you how that experience, my travel to Colombia and and Mary Roach´s book are related.

In 1992 in the city of Barranqilla, Colombia a gentleman by the name of Oscar Rafael Hernandez was “bludgeoned” over the head while responding to a request to appear at the Universidad Libre. It’s reported Hernandez woke up in a vat of fermaldyhyde next to a handful of corpses that were to be used for “medicine.” Mr. Hernandez was fortunate, unlike the roughly 13 other people actually murdered at the Universidad, he survived, while those others bodies where used for dissection and who knows what else at the medical facility. At this point I’d really just like to thank Mary Roach for the advice to stay away from Universidad Libre.

This little story comes early in Roach’s book while she explains the art of human dissection for medical practice as well as the history of said dissection. Throughout the means of obtaining corpses for this purpose has always been questionable and Mr. Hernandez’s story just goes to demonstrate that murder for corpses still happens. That said though it shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that physical dissection is a dying (no pun intended) educational tool.

While here in Colombia I had the opportunity to actually visit a medical school campus at the Universidad de Antiocha in Medellin. While I was not exactly vigilant about my safety I felt pretty secure that no one was going to try and kill me so they could see what was inside me. If they did, they’d probably be in for a shock anyways, I don’t think there’s much there anyhow. The campus itself though was really nice, I can’t say that I’d liked to be cut open there due to the lack of air conditioning and the patient which we say being moved around on gurney’s outside over speed bumps. But for the most part, it was quite impressive. And like I said the fact that there was no one lurking around ready to take my body and sell it helped, just a little.

Now I must take the time to thank Mary for my next vacation location. I think I would like to visit the University of Tennessee and their anthropological research facility. For this is where human decomposition is studied. Just lovely. I think a nice stroll through the forested grove behind the UT Medical Center would be quite romantic on a humid May afternoon, despite the people spread out lying on their backs in the grove. Or maybe a jaunt around the ponds near by would be nice. So long, that is, you don’t mind strolling amongst a bunch of decomposing bodies or jaunts around ponds in which there are bodies submerged for the same purpose, the study of human decomposition. Ah Mary, you’ve enlightened me so.

Unfortunately at this point in my review I must scorn Ms. Roach (after all, so far all i’ve done is trumpet her). I happened to be on an airplane while reading the chapter titles “Beyond the Black Box.” As you may be able to guess this particular chapter deals with planes crashes and how the bodies of the victims may be studied to determine the cause of the crash. As you can imagine it was pretty unsettling reading about that 35k feet in the air. Reading this chapter mid-flight was very much a kin to being the only gringo riding on a 12 hour night bus through Colombia during which the movie Hostel is played, not scary at all, I promise. Luckily in the case of Roach’s book this was a short chapter. And luckily for me on that bus I made it where I was headed in one piece.

At the end of the day I liked Mary’s book. So much so that I let my travel mate David borrow, read and consequently destroy the book (due to back sweat, I’ll tell you the story if you really want to know). After which the book was loaned to Elena a friend we made on our travels. The only thing I will be critical of is the end of the book. I started to get a little bit bored. It’s true, it happened. It almost felt as though Ms. Roach or her publisher needed a little bit more for the book to actually be considered a book and threw in some filler to make up for its length or something else. Honestly, I’m not really sure. Despite that though, everyone who recommended this book to me was right, it was good, good in a “some day I may read that chapter again” kind of way. So, there you have it, if you’re interested in medicine, corpses and a have that little organ donor sticker on your driver’s license, I recommend Stiff.