Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.

A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work.

(11 illustrations)Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence. Informative, yes entertaining, absolutely. Roach delights in imparting odd information, such as the fact that 18th-century students at certain Scottish medical schools could pay their tuition in corpses rather than cash, and when the curious facts unearthed by her research don’t fit neatly into her narrative, she slips them into droll footnotes. She also provides history, mostly focusing on body-snatchers and the anatomists who used their services. While Roach provides a vivid picture of the macabre activities she witnesses, it’s her offbeat musings, admissions, and reactions that give such life to her tales of the dead. As for other exotic uses, a chapter subtitled “Medical Cannibalism and the Case of the Human Dumplings” tells it all. Not only do dead bodies provide organ transplants for fellow humans but they may, Roach reports, soon be transformed into compost-at least in ecologically aware Sweden. She shows the value of cadavers in car-crash testing, in weapons research by the US Army, in investigations into airline disasters, in studies of the crucifixion and the guillotine. Roach watches an embalming at a college for morticians and visits a university study of human decomposition. From the opening chapter, in which 40 severed human heads are prepped for a plastic-surgery seminar, to the final one, in which whole bodies are plastinated with liquid polymers for a museum exhibit, she proves herself a keen observer and unflagging questioner. Fascinating, unexpectedly fresh and funny look at the multiplicity of ways in which cadavers benefit the living.Īuthor of the “My Planet” column in Reader’s Digest and a regular contributor to ’s “Health and Body” section, Roach displays here a knack for persuading morticians, scientists, engineers, and others whose work involves corpses to let her watch them at their labors.

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