Stiff Read online

  Matt is still working on the setup. Deb is intent on her accelerometers. Normally, accelerometers are screwed into place, but if she were to screw them into the bone, the bone would be weakened and would break more easily in the impact. Instead she secures them to the bone with wire ties and then wedges wood shims underneath to tighten the fit. As she works, she slips the wire cutters into and out of the cadaver’s mittened hand, as though he were a surgical nurse. Another way for him to help.

  With the radio playing and the three of us talking, the room has a feeling of late-night congeniality. I find myself thinking that it’s nice for UM 006 to have company. There can be no lonelier state of being than that of being a corpse. Here, in the lab, he’s part of something, part of the group, the center of everyone’s attention. Of course, these are stupid thoughts, for UM 006 is a mass of tissue and bone who can no more feel loneliness than he can feel Marth’s fingers probing the flesh around his collarbone. But that’s how I feel about it at the moment.

  It is past nine now. UM 006 has begun to put out a subtle gamy smell, the mild but unmistakable fetor of a butcher shop on a hot afternoon. “How long,” I ask, “can he stay out at room temperature before he starts to…” Marth waits for me to finish my sentence. “…change?” She says maybe half a day. She is looking put-upon. The ties aren’t tight enough and the Krazy Glue’s not crazy anymore. It’s going to be a long night.

  John Cavanaugh calls down that there’s pizza upstairs, and the three of us, Deb, Matt Mason, and I, leave the dead man by himself. It feels a little rude.

  On the way upstairs, I ask Deb how she wound up working with dead bodies for a living. “Oh, I always wanted to do cadaver research,” she says, with exactly the same enthusiasm and sincerity with which a more usual individual would say “I always wanted to be an archaeologist” or “I always wanted to live by the sea.”

  “John was so psyched. Nobody wants to do cadaver research.” In her office, she takes a bottle of a perfume called Happy from a desk drawer. “So I smell something else,” she explains. She has promised to give me some papers, and while she searches for them I look at a pile of snapshots on her desk. And then, very quickly, I don’t. The photographs are close-ups from a previous cadaver’s shoulder autopsy: meaty red and parted skin. Matt looks down at the pile. “These aren’t your vacation shots, are they, Deb?”

  By half past eleven, all that remains is to get UM 006 into driving posture. He is slumped and leaning to one side. He is the guy next to you on the plane, asleep and inching closer to your shoulder.

  John Cavanaugh takes the cadaver by the ankles and pushes back on him, to try to get him to sit up in the seat. He steps back. The cadaver slides back toward him. He pushes him again. This time he holds him while Matt encircles UM 006’s knees and the entire circumference of the car seat with duct tape. “This probably won’t make it into the ‘101 Uses’ list,” observes Matt.

  “His head’s wrong,” says John. “It needs to be straight ahead.” More duct tape. The radio is playing the Romantics, “That’s What I Like About You.”

  “He’s slumping again.”

  “Try the winch?” Deb loops a canvas strap under his arms and presses a button that raises a ceiling-mounted motor winch. The cadaver shrugs, slowly, and holds it, like a Borscht Belt comedian. He lifts slightly from his seat, and is lowered back down, sitting straighter now. “Good, perfect,” says John.

  Everyone steps back. UM 006 has a comic’s timing. He waits a beat, two beats, then slips forward again. You have to laugh. The absurdity of the scene and the punch-drunk hour are making it hard not to. Deb gets some pieces of foam to prop up his back, which seems to do the trick.

  Matt runs a final check of the connections. The radio—I’m not making this up—is playing “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Five more minutes pass. Matt fires the piston. It sounds a loud bang as it shoots out, though the impact itself is silent. UM 006 falls over, not like a villain shot in a Hollywood movie, but slowly, like an off-balance laundry sack. He falls over onto a foam pad that has been set out for this purpose, and John and Deb step forward to steady him. And that’s that. Without the screech of skidding tires and the crunch and fold of metal, an impact is neither violent nor disturbing. Distilled to its essence, controlled and planned, it is now simply science, no longer tragedy.

  The family of UM 006 does not know what happened to him this evening. They know only that he donated his remains for use in medical education or research. There are many reasons for this. At the time a person or his family decides to donate his remains, no one knows what those remains will be used for, or even at which university. The body goes to a morgue facility at the university to which it was donated, but may be shipped, as was UM 006, from that school to another.

  For a family to be fully informed of what is happening to their loved one, the information would have to come from the researchers themselves, after they’ve taken receipt of the body (or body part) but before they run their test. As a result of the subcommittee hearings, that was sometimes done. Automotive impact researchers who received federal NHTSA funding and who had not made it clear in their willed body consent forms that the remains might be used for research were required to contact families prior to the experiment. According to Rolf Eppinger, chief of the NHTSA Biomechanics Research Center, it was rare for the family to renege on the deceased’s consent.

  I spoke with Mike Walsh, who worked for one of NHTSA’s main contractors, Calspan. It was Walsh who, once the body arrived, called the family to set up a meeting—preferably, owing to the highly perishable state of unembalmed remains, within a day or two after the death. You would think, as principal investigator on these studies, that Walsh would have delegated the enormously uncomfortable task to someone else. But Walsh preferred to do it himself. He told the families precisely how their loved one would be used and why. “The entire program was explained to them. Some studies were sled impact studies, some were pedestrian impact studies,* some were in full-scale crash vehicles.” Clearly Walsh has a gift. Out of forty-two families contacted, only two revoked consent—not because of the nature or specifics of the study, but because they had thought the body was going to be used for organ donation.

  I asked Walsh whether any family members had asked to see a copy of the study when it was published. No one had. “We got the impression, quite frankly, that we were giving people more information than they wanted to hear.”

  In England and other Commonwealth countries, researchers and anatomy instructors sidestep the possibility of family or public disapproval by using body parts and prosections—the name given to embalmed cadaver segments used in anatomy labs—rather than whole cadavers. England’s antivivisectionists, as animal rights activists are called there, are as outspoken as America’s, and the things that outrage them are more encompassing, and, dare I say it, nonsensical. To give you a taste: In 1916, a group of animal rights activists successfully petitioned the British Undertakers Association on behalf of the horses that pulled their hearses, urging members to stop making the horses wear plumes on their heads.

  The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human leg has no face, no eyes, no hands that once held babies or stroked a lover’s cheek. It’s difficult to associate it with the living person from which it came. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It’s okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.

  But let’s be rational. Why is it okay for someone to guide a table saw through Granddad’s thigh and then pack up the leg for shipment to a lab, where it will be suspended from a hook and impacted with a simulated car bumper, yet not okay to ship him and use him whole? What makes cutting his leg off first any less distasteful or disrespectful? In
1901, the French surgeon René Le Fort devoted a great deal of his time to studying the effects of blunt impact on the bones of the face. Sometimes he severed the heads: “After decapitation, the head was violently thrown against the rounded border of a marble table…,” reads an experiment description from The Maxillo-Facial Works of René Le Fort. Other times he left the heads on: “The entire cadaver was in a dorsal…position with the head hanging back over the table. A violent blow was given with a wooden club on the right upper jaw….” What person who takes offense at the latter could reasonably be comfortable with the former? What, ethically or aesthetically, is the difference?

  Furthermore, it’s often desirable, from the standpoint of biomechanical fidelity, to use the entire enchilada. A shoulder mounted on a stand and hit with an impactor doesn’t behave in the same manner, or incur the same injuries, as a shoulder mounted on a torso. When shoulders on stands start getting driver’s licenses, then it will make sense to study them. Even scientific inquiries as seemingly straightforward as How much will a human stomach hold before it bursts? have gone the extra mile. In 1891, an inquiring German doctor surnamed Key-Aberg undertook a replication of a French study done six years earlier, in which isolated human stomachs were filled to the point of rupture. Key-Aberg’s experiment differed from that of his French predecessor in that he left the stomachs inside their owners. He presumably felt that this better approximated the realities of a hearty meal, for rare indeed is the dinner party attended by freestanding stomachs. To that end, he is said to have made a point of composing his corpses in the sitting position. In this case, our man’s attention to biomechanical correctness proved not to matter. In both cases, according to a 1979 article in The American Journal of Surgery, the stomachs gave out at 4,000 cc’s, or about four quarts.*

  Many times, of course, a researcher doesn’t need a whole body, just a piece of it. Orthopedic surgeons developing new techniques or new replacement joints use limbs instead of whole cadavers. Ditto product safety researchers. You do not need an entire dead body to find out, say, what happens to a finger when you close a particular brand of power window on it. You need some fingers. You do not need an entire body to see whether softer baseballs cause less damage to Little Leaguers’ eyes. You need some eyes, mounted in clear plastic simulated eye sockets so that high-speed video cameras can document exactly what is happening when the baseballs hit them.*

  Here’s the thing: No one really wants to work with whole cadavers. Unless researchers really need to, they won’t. Rather than use whole bodies to simulate swimmers in a test of a safety cage for outboard motor propellers, Tyler Kress, who runs the Sports Biomechanics Lab at the University of Tennessee’s Engineering Institute for Trauma and Injury Prevention, went to the trouble of tracking down artificial ball-and-socket hip joints and gluing them to cadaver legs with surgical cement and then gluing the resulting cadaver-leg-and-hip-joint hybrid to a crash test dummy torso.

  Kress says it wasn’t fear of public reprisal that led him to do this, but practicality. “A leg,” he told me, “is so much easier to work with and handle.” Parts are easier to lift and maneuver. They take up less space in the freezer. Kress has worked with just about all of them: heads, spines, shins, hands, fingers. “Legs, mostly,” he says. He spent last summer looking at the biomechanics of twisted and broken ankles. This summer he and his colleagues are running instrumented leg-drop tests to look at the sorts of injuries that accompany vertical drops, such as befall mountain bikers and snowboarders. “I would challenge you to find anybody that’s broken more legs than we have.”

  I asked Kress, in an e-mail exchange, whether he has had occasion to wrangle a cadaveric crotch into an athletic cup and take aim at it with baseballs, hockey pucks, what-have-you. He has not, nor is he aware of any sports injury researcher who has. “You would think that…‘racking’—i.e., scrotal impacts—would be a high research priority,” he wrote. “I’m thinking no one wants to go there in the lab.”

  Which is not to say that science does not, occasionally, go there. At the local medical school library, I ran a Pub Med search for journal articles featuring the words “cadaveric” and “penis.” With the monitor shoved back as far as possible into the cubicle, lest the people on either side of me see the screen and alert the librarian, I browsed twenty-five entries, most of them anatomical investigations. There were the urologists from Seattle investigating the distribution pattern of dorsal nerves along the penile shaft (twenty-eight cadaver penises).* There were the French anatomists injecting red liquid latex into penile arteries to study vascular flow (twenty cadaver penises). There were the Belgians calculating interference of the ischiocavernosus muscles in rigidity during penile erection (thirty cadaver penises). For the past twenty years, all the world over, people in white coats and squeaking shoes have been calmly, methodically making the cut that dare not speak its name. It makes Tyler Kress seem like a cream puff.

  On the other side of the gender gap, a Pub Med search on “clitoris” and “cadaver” turned up but a single entry. Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, author of “Anatomical Relationship Between Urethra and Clitoris” (ten cadaver perinea), bristles at the disparity: “Modern anatomy texts,” she writes. “have reduced descriptions of female perineal anatomy to a brief adjunct after a complete description of the male anatomy.” I picture O’Connell as a sort of Gloria Steinem of the research set, the fast-moving, can-do feminist in a lab coat. She is also the first researcher I’ve come across in my haphazard wanderings to have worked with infant cadavers. (She did this because the comparable male erectile tissue research had, for reasons not explained, been done on infants.) Her paper states that she obtained ethical approval from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology and the Board of Medical Research of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which clearly don’t go about their business with the grim specter of media evisceration foremost in their minds.

  5

  BEYOND THE BLACK BOX

  When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash

  Dennis Shanahan works in a roomy suite on the second floor of the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, in a subdivision ten minutes east of downtown Carlsbad, California. The office is quiet and sunny and offers no hint of the grisly nature of the work done within. Shanahan is an injury analyst. Much of the time, he analyzes the wounds and breakages of the living. He consults for car companies being sued by people making dubious claims (“the seat belt broke,” “I wasn’t driving,” and so on) that are easily debunked by looking at their injuries. Every now and then the bodies he studies are dead ones. Such was the case with TWA Flight 800.

  Bound for Paris from JFK International Airport on July 17, 1996, Flight 800 blew apart in the air over the Atlantic off East Moriches, New York. Witness reports were contradictory. Some claimed to have seen a missile strike the aircraft. Traces of explosives had turned up in the recovered wreckage, but no trace of bomb hardware had been found. (Later it would come out that the explosive materials had been planted in the plane long before the crash, as part of a sniffer-dog training exercise.) Conspiracy theories sprouted and spread. The investigation dragged on without a definitive answer to the question on everyone’s mind: What—or who—had brought Flight 800 down from the sky?

  Within days of the crash, Shanahan flew to New York to visit the bodies of the dead and see what they had to say. Last spring, I flew to Carlsbad, California, to visit Shanahan. I wanted to know how—scientifically and emotionally—a person does this job.

  I had other questions for him too. Shanahan is a man who knows the reality behind the nightmare. He knows, in grim medical detail, exactly what happens to people in different types of crashes. He knows how they typically die, whether they’re likely to have been cognizant of what was happening, and how—in a low-altitude crash, anyway—they might have increased their chances of survival. I told him I would only take up an hour of his time, but stayed for five.

  A crashed plane will usually tell its own s
tory. Sometimes literally, in the voices on the cockpit flight recorder; sometimes by implication, in the rendings and charrings of the fallen craft. But when a plane goes down over the ocean, its story may be patchy and incoherent. If the water is especially deep or the currents swift and chaotic, the black box may not be recovered, nor may enough of the sunken wreckage be recovered to determine for sure what occurred in the plane’s last minutes. When this happens, investigators turn to what is known in aviation pathology textbooks as “the human wreckage”: the bodies of passengers. For unlike a wing or a piece of fuselage, a corpse will float to the water’s surface. By studying victims’ wounds—the type, the severity, which side of the body they’re on—an injury analyst can begin to piece together the horrible unfolding of events.

  Shanahan is waiting for me when I arrive at the airport. He is wearing Dockers, a short-sleeved shirt, and aviator-frame glasses. His hair lies neatly on either side of a perfectly straight part. It could almost be a toupee, but isn’t. He is polite, composed, and immediately likable. He reminds me of my pharmacist Mike.

  He isn’t at all what I’d had in mind. I had imagined someone gruff, morgue-hardened, prone to expletives. I had planned to do my interview in the field, in the aftermath of a crash. I pictured the two of us in a makeshift morgue in some small-town dance hall or high-school gym, he in his stained lab coat, me with my notepad. This was before I realized that Shanahan himself does not do the autopsies for the crashes he investigates. These are done by teams of medical examiners from nearby county morgues. Though he goes to the site and will often examine bodies for one reason or another, Shanahan works mostly with the autopsy reports, correlating these with the flight’s seating chart to identify clusters of telltale injuries. He explained that visiting him at work on a crash site might have required a wait of several years, for the cause of most crashes isn’t a mystery, and thus input from the cadavers isn’t often called for.