Stiff (10 page)

The skin and hair at once scorch, char and

burn. Heat coagulation of muscle protein may

become evident at this stage, causing the

muscles slowly to contract, and there may be a

steady divarication of the thighs with

gradually developing flexion of the limbs.

There is a popular idea that early in the

cremation process the heat causes the trunk to

flex forwards violently so that the body

suddenly "sits up," bursting open the lid of the coffin, but this has not been observed

personally….

Occasionally there is swelling of the abdomen

before the skin and abdominal muscles char and

split; the swelling is due to formation of

steam and the expansion of gases in the

abdominal contents.

Destruction of the soft tissues gradually

exposes parts of the skeleton. The skull is

soon devoid of covering, then the bones of the

limbs appear…. The abdominal contents burn

fairly slowly, and the lungs more slowly

still. It has been observed that the brain is

specially resistant to complete combustion

during cremation of the body. Even when the

vault of the skull has broken and fallen away,

the brain has been seen as a dark, fused mass

with a rather sticky consistency…. Eventually

the spine becomes visible as the viscera

disappear, the bones glow whitely in the

flames and the skeleton falls apart.

Drops of sweat bead the inside surface of Nicole's splash shield. We've been here more than an hour. It's almost over. Theo looks at Mack. "Will we be suturing the anus?" He turns to me. "Otherwise leakage can wick into the funeral clothing and it's an awful mess."

I don't mind Theo's matter-of-factness. Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

Since our decedent will not be having a funeral service, it is up to Mack whether the students must take the final step. He decides to let it go.

Unless the visitor wishes to see it. They look at me.

"No thank you." Enough biology for today.

Footnotes:

[
1]
Purists among them insist on the real deal. I spent an afternoon in an abandoned dormitory at Moffett Air Force Base, watching one such woman, Shirley Hammond, put her canine noses through their paces.

Hammond is a fixture on the base, regularly seen walking to and from her car with a pink gym bag and a plastic cooler. If you were to ask her what she's got in there, and she chose to answer you honestly, the answer would go more or less like this: a bloody shirt, dirt from beneath a decomposed corpse, human tissue buried in a chunk of cement, a piece of cloth rubbed on cadavers, a human molar. No synthetics for Shirley's dogs.

[
2]
And, alas, most expensive and least well attended. In May 2002, a year after I visited, it closed its doors.

[
3]
But by no means the first to attempt to keep bodies from rotting.

Outtakes of the early days of corporeal preservation included a seventeenth-century Italian physician named Girolamo Segato, who devised a way of turning bodies into stone, and a London M.D. named Thomas Marshall, who, in 1839, published a paper describing an embalming technique that entailed generously puncturing the surface of the body with scissors and then brushing the body with vinegar, much the way the Adolph's company would have housewives prick steaks to get the meat tenderizer way down in.

[
4]
Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on "the father of" turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women's boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern

dairying, Canada's permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus.

4

Dead Man Driving

Human crash test dummies and the ghastly necessary science
of impact tolerance

By and large, the dead aren't very talented. They can't play water polo, or lace up their boots, or maximize market share. They can't tell a joke, and they can't dance for beans. There is one thing dead people excel at.

They're very good at handling pain.

For instance, UM 006. UM 006 is a cadaver who recently journeyed across Detroit from the University of Michigan to the bioengineering building at Wayne State University. His job, which he will undertake at approximately 7 P.M. tonight, is to be hit in the shoulder with a linear impactor. His collarbone and scapula may break, but he will not feel a thing, nor will the injuries interfere with his day-to-day activities. By agreeing to be walloped in the shoulder, cadaver UM 006 is helping researchers figure out how much force a human shoulder in a side-impact car crash can withstand before it registers a serious injury.

Over the past sixty years, the dead have helped the living work out human tolerance limits for skull slammings and chest skewerings, knee crammings and gut mashings: all the ugly, violent things that happen to a human being in a car crash. Once automobile manufacturers know how much force a skull or spine or shoulder can withstand, they can design cars that, they hope, will not exceed that force in a crash.

You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don't use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless. You first need to know, for instance, that the maximum amount a rib cage can compress without damaging the soft, wet things inside it is 2¾ inches. Then, should a dummy slam into a steering wheel of a newly designed car and register a chest deflection of four inches, you know the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) isn't going to be very happy with that car.

The dead's first contribution to safe driving was the non-face-gashing windshield. The first Fords came without windshields, which is why you see pictures of early motorists wearing goggles. They weren't trying to affect a dashing World War I flying-ace mien; they were keeping wind and bugs out of their eyes. The first windscreens were made of ordinary window glass, which served to cut the wind and, unfortunately, the driver's face in the event of a crash. Even with the early laminated-glass windshields, which were in use from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, front-seat passengers were walking away from accidents with gruesome, gaping scalp-to-chin lacerations. Heads would hit the windshield, knock out a head-shaped hole in the glass, and, on their violent, bouncing return back through that hole, get sliced open on the jagged edges.

Tempered glass, the follow-up innovation, was strong enough to keep heads from smashing through, but the concern then became that striking the stiffer glass would cause brain damage. (The less a material gives, the more damaging the forces of the impact: Think ice rink versus lawn.) Neurologists knew that a concussion from a forehead impact was accompanied by some degree of skull fracture. You can't give a dead man a concussion, but you can check his skull for hairline cracks, and this is what researchers did. At Wayne State, cadavers were leaned forward over a simulated car window and dropped from varying heights (simulating varying speeds) so that their foreheads hit the glass.

(Contrary to popular impression, impact test cadavers were not typically ushered into the front seats of actual running automobiles, driving being one of the other things cadavers don't do well. More often than not, the cadaver was either dropped or it remained still while some sort of controllable impacting device was directed at it.) The study showed that tempered glass, provided it wasn't too thick, was unlikely to create forces strong enough to cause concussion. Windshields today have even more give, enabling the modern-day head to undergo a 30-mph unbelted car crash straight into a wall and come away with little to complain about save a welt and an owner whose driving skills are up there with the average cadaver's.

Despite forgiving windshields and knobless, padded dashboards, brain damage is still the major culprit in car crash fatalities. Very often, the bang to the head isn't all that severe. It's the combination of banging it into something and whipping it in one direction and then rapidly back at high speeds (rotation, this is called) that tends to cause serious brain damage. "If you hit the head without any rotation, it takes a huge amount of force to knock you out," says Wayne State Bioengineering Center director Albert King. "Similarly, if you rotate the head without hitting anything, it's hard to cause severe damage." (High-speed rear-enders sometimes do this; the brain is whipped back and forth so fast that shear forces tear open the veins on its surface.) "In the run-of-the-mill crash, there's some of each, neither of which is very high, but you can get a severe head injury." The sideways jarring of a side-impact crash is especially notorious for putting passengers in comas.

King and some of his colleagues are trying to get a handle on what, exactly, is happening to the brain in these banging/whipping-around scenarios. Across town at Henry Ford Hospital, the team has been filming cadavers' heads with a high-speed X-ray video camera[
1]
during simulated crashes, to find out what's going on inside the skull. So far they're finding a lot more "sloshing of the brain," as King put it, with more rotation than was previously thought to occur. "The brain traces out a kind of figure eight," says King. It is something best left to skaters: When brains do this they get what's called diffuse axonal injury—

potentially fatal tears and leaks in the microtubules of the brain's axons.

Chest injuries are the other generous contributor to crash fatalities. (This was true even before the dawn of the automobile; the great anatomist Vesalius, in 1557, described the burst aorta of a man thrown from his horse.) In the days before seat belts, the steering wheel was the most lethal item in a car's interior. In a head-on collision, the body would slide forward and the chest would slam into the steering wheel, often with enough force to fold the rim of the wheel around the column, in the manner of a closing umbrella. "We had a guy take a tree head-on and there was the N from the steering wheel—the car was a Nash—imprinted in the center of his chest," recalls Don Huelke, a safety researcher who spent the years from 1961 through 1970 visiting the scene of every car accident fatality in the county surrounding the University of Michigan and recording what happened and how.

Steering wheel columns up through the sixties were narrow, sometimes only six or seven inches in diameter. Just as a ski pole will sink into the snow without its circular basket, a steering column with its rim flattened back will sink into a body. In an unfortunate design decision, the steering wheel shaft of the average automobile was angled and positioned to point straight at the driver's heart.[
2]
In a head-on, you'd be impaled in pretty much the last place you'd want to be impaled. Even when the metal didn't penetrate the chest, the impact alone was often fatal. Despite its thickness, an aorta ruptures relatively easily. This is because every other second, it has a one-pound weight suspended from it: the human heart, filled with blood. Get the weight moving with enough force, as happened in blunt impacts from steering wheels, and even the body's largest blood vessel can't take the strain. If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole—blood-squeezed-out—portion of your heartbeat.

With all this in mind, bioengineers and automobile manufacturers (GM, notably) began ushering cadavers into the driver's seats of crash simulators, front halves of cars on machine-accelerated sleds that are stopped abruptly to mimic the forces of a head-on collision. The goal, one of them anyway, was to design a steering column that would collapse on impact, absorbing enough of the shock to prevent serious injury to the heart and its supporting vessels. (Hoods are now designed to do this too, so that even cars in relatively minor accidents have completely jackknifed hoods, the idea being that the more the car crumples, the less you do.) GM's first collapsible steering wheel shaft, introduced in the early 1960s, cut the risk of death in a head-on collision by half.

And so it went. The collective cadaver résumé boasts contributions to government legislation for lap-shoulder belts, air bags, dashboard padding, and recessed dashboard knobs (autopsy files from the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a few X-ray images of human heads with radio knobs embedded in them). It was not pretty work. In countless seat-belt studies—car manufacturers, seeking to save money, spent years trying to prove that seat belts caused more injuries than they prevented and thus shouldn't be required—bodies were strapped in and crashed, and their innards were then probed for ruptures and manglings. To establish the tolerance limits of the human face, cadavers have been seated with their cheekbones in the firing lines of "rotary strikers."