Roach visits a UCSF medical anatomy lab where forty severed cadaver heads are prepared for facial surgery practice.

A memorial service is held for donated cadavers at UCSF Medical School, where first-year students prepare to encounter their first human cadaver.

Roach tours the University of Tennessee's open-air human decay research facility alongside forensic anthropologist Arpad Vass.

A cadaver labeled UM 006 undergoes metal piston impact testing at Wayne State University's Bioengineering Center.

Injury analyst Dennis Shanahan walks Roach through the forensic process of determining what happened when TWA Flight 800 fell from the sky.

Shanahan determines that sparks from frayed wires igniting a fuel tank, not a bomb, caused the TWA Flight 800 disaster.

Captain Louis La Garde tests the physiological effects of two rifles on twenty cadavers for the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

Dr. Pierre Barbet uses cadavers and amputated limbs to scientifically test nail placement during crucifixion, attempting to verify the Shroud of Turin.

A beating-heart cadaver called H is wheeled into UCSF Medical Center for organ harvesting surgery while Roach observes.

Surgeons remove H's heart during organ harvesting, and OR staff report sensing a mysterious presence in the room.

French physician Beaurieux calls out a prisoner's name moments after guillotine execution and watches the severed head turn its eyes toward him.

Roach travels to Hainan Province, China, to investigate claims that the White Temple Restaurant served dumplings made from cadavers.

Roach finds the White Temple Restaurant story to be a false urban legend after completing her firsthand investigation.

Swedish ecologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak presents her human composting company Promessa as an environmentally friendly alternative to burial and cremation.

Roach decides her body will be donated to science and imagines future medical students discovering she wrote a book about cadavers.

This pool follows Mary Roach as she investigates the many ways human cadavers have driven scientific and medical progress across history. Beginning at a UCSF anatomy lab filled with severed heads, Roach moves through decay research facilities, crash investigation offices, military testing labs, and religious science experiments. She witnesses organ harvesting surgery, tracks a plane crash investigation to its conclusion, and travels to China to chase an urban legend about a restaurant serving human flesh. Each stop reveals a different domain in which the dead have silently shaped the world of the living. The pool closes with Roach's personal commitment to donate her own body to science, completing her arc from curious observer to willing participant.

The essential journey through cadaver science, from surgical labs to foreign investigations.

Roach frames cadavers as superheroes who endure car crashes, gunfire, and falls without flinching in service of scientific advancement.

Surgeon Marilena Marignani tells Roach she will not donate her own body to science, citing concerns about lack of respect for cadavers.

Anatomy instructors in the 19th century encourage students to raid graveyards to supply bodies for the booming field of human dissection.

Roach and Vass observe a decomposing body at the decay facility in the advanced bloat stage, where bacterial gas causes visible distension.

Roach, Vass, and a media relations officer sit down to lunch after the decay tour, still carrying the smell of decomposing flesh.

Roach witnesses the complete embalming process performed on a fifty-seven-year-old man at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science.

Researchers at Wayne State use isolated body parts rather than whole cadavers to sidestep public disapproval of impact testing.

Rick Lowden fires multiple weapons into ballistic gelatin with Roach to test whether the neural overload theory explains why shooting victims drop instantly.

Commander Marlene DeMaio tests newly developed military body armor on cadavers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

Frederick Zugibe straps live volunteers onto a cross built in his own garage to simulate crucifixion and challenge Barbet's earlier findings.

German waiting mortuaries in the 1800s house newly deceased bodies until putrefaction confirms death, but no bodies are ever revived there.

Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov becomes the first to restore a transplanted dog's head to full cerebral function.

Roach discovers that human blood and fat were historically sold by executioners and body snatchers for their supposed curative powers.

Roach visits a research facility to witness tissue digestion, a process that dissolves bodies using water and lye as a burial alternative.

Roach contacts the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology about donating her skeleton for display but ultimately decides against submitting her application.

This pool captures the secondary layers of Roach's investigation, including the historical context, behind-the-scenes procedures, and individual human stories surrounding cadaver use. From 19th-century grave robbing to Soviet head transplant experiments, the dead have been employed in surprising and often troubling ways throughout history. Roach visits embalming labs, an open-air decay field, and military research facilities to understand both the methods and the people involved. Colorful figures emerge along the way, from surgeons who refuse to donate their own bodies to gun enthusiasts who balk at shooting cadavers. The pool closes with Roach's personal exploration of her posthumous options, including a skeleton donation she ultimately decides against.

The supporting science, strange history, and human stories behind cadaver research.

Roach explains she could not emotionally separate a cadaver from the person it was, using her own mother as a personal example.

Roach learns that surgery was historically ranked alongside barbering, revealing how dramatically the medical profession's status has transformed over centuries.

Roach discovers that cadaver dissection is being phased out of medical school curricula due to time constraints, not ethical objections.

Roach observes the most decomposed body at the decay facility, a woman who lies in mud formed from her own liquefied remains.

Roach finds that without the sounds of a crash, cadaver impact testing at Wayne State feels neither violent nor disturbing to witness.

Shanahan explains that the intactness of recovered bodies provides key evidence about whether a bomb or a mechanical failure caused a crash.

During ballistic gelatin testing, Roach realizes that munitions research is fundamentally designed to help people take lives, not protect them.

Roach dismisses Frederick Zugibe's crucifixion experiments as religious propaganda, arguing science should not be used to serve spiritual agendas.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall conducts experiments to determine the weight of the human soul and concludes it measures about three-fourths of an ounce.

A murder trial in Oakland forces the legal system to formally recognize brain death as the legal equivalent of death.

Charles Guthrie develops a surgical method for stitching blood vessels together, creating a foundational technique for organ and tissue transplantation.

Dr. Robert White tells Roach that an isolated brain's sensory experience may resemble deprivation chamber studies that drove human subjects insane.

Roach discovers the ancient Chinese Materia Medica contains a recipe for mellified man, a cadaver-based confection consumed for its healing properties.

Roach visits the University of Michigan to witness the plastination process but finds it too cost-prohibitive to choose for her own remains.

Roach concludes that survivors, not the deceased, should control what happens to a body after death, drawing on her parents' conflict over cremation.

This pool centers on the moments when Roach and the reader shift in their understanding of death, science, and the human body. From her opening reflection on the emotional difficulty of separating a loved one from their cadaver, Roach moves through a series of discoveries that upend conventional assumptions about medicine, religion, and law. She uncovers that medical training is changing not for ethical reasons but for practical ones, that munitions research prioritizes killing over saving, and that soul-weighing experiments were once accepted as legitimate science. Legal, scientific, and personal turning points converge, particularly in the chapters on organ harvesting and head transplantation. The pool closes with Roach's conclusion that the living, not the dead, should decide what becomes of a body after death.

The revelations, ethical reckonings, and personal shifts that reshape Roach's understanding of death.