Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Author:Mary Roach
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: History: specific events & topics, Medical Research, Social Science, Science: general issues, Research, Science, Medical, Medicine (Specific Aspects), Dead, Fiction, Sociology: death & dying, Social Studies: General, Forensic Medicine, Ethics, General, Human dissection, Human experimentation in medicine, Death & Dying, History
ISBN: 9780393324822
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2004-04-26T05:00:00+00:00

degree angle with the stipes (the upright beam) of the cross. In the pushed-up position, the arms formed a 70-degree angle with the stipes.

Barbet then tried to verify this, using one of the many unclaimed corpses that were delivered to the anatomy department from the city's hospitals and poorhouses.

Once Barbet got the body back to his lab, he proceeded to nail it to a homemade cross. He then raised the cross upright and measured the angle of the arms when the slumping body came to a stop. Lo and behold, it was 65 degrees. (As the cadaver could of course not be persuaded to push itself back up, the second angle remained unverified.) The French edition of Barbet's book includes a photograph of the dead man on the cross. The cadaver is shown from the waist up, so I cannot say whether Barbet dressed him Jesus-style in swaddling undergarments, but I can say that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the monologuist Spalding Gray.

Barbet's idea presented an anatomical conundrum. For if there were periods when Jesus' legs gave out and he was forced to hang the entire weight of his body off his nailed palms, wouldn't the nails rip through the flesh? Barbet wondered whether, in fact, Jesus had been nailed through the stronger, bonier wrists, and not the flesh of the palms. He decided to do an experiment, detailed in A Doctor at Cavalry. This time, rather than wrestle another whole cadaver onto his cross, he crucified a lone arm. Barely had the owner of the arm left the room when Barbet had his hammer out:

Having just amputated an arm two-thirds of the

way up from a vigorous man, I drove a square

nail of about 1/3 of an inch (the nail of the

Passion) into the middle of the palm….I gently

suspended a weight of 100 pounds from the

elbow (half the weight of the body of a man

about 6 foot tall). After ten minutes, the

wound had lengthened;… I then gave the whole a

moderate shake, and I saw the nail suddenly

forcing its way through the space between the

two metacarpal heads and making a large tear

in the skin….A second slight shake tore away

what skin remained.

In the weeks that followed, Barbet went through twelve more arms in a quest to find a suitable point in the human wrist through which to hammer a 1/3-inch nail. This was not a good time for vigorous men with minor hand injuries to visit the offices of Dr. Pierre Barbet.

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