Stiff - The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Author:Mary Roach [Roach, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-05-30T13:58:42+00:00

Eventually, Barbet's busy hammer made its way to what he believed was the true site of the nail's passage: Destot's space, a pea-sized gap between the two rows of the bones of the wrist. "In each case," he wrote, "the point took up its own direction and seemed to be slipping along the walls of a funnel and then to find its way spontaneously into the space which was awaiting it." It was as though divine intervention applied to nail trajectories as well. "And this spot," Barbet continued triumphantly, "is precisely where the shroud shows us the mark of the nail, a spot of which no forger would have had any idea…."

And then along came Frederick Zugibe.

Zugibe is a gruff, overworked medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, who spends his spare time researching the Crucifixion and

"Barbet-bashing" at what he calls "Shroudie conferences" around the world. He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute, and then he'll come back and say, "Excuse me. A nine-year-old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we?"

Zugibe is not on a mission to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin—as, I suspect, Barbet was. He became interested in the science of crucifixion fifty years ago, as a biology student, when someone gave him a paper to read about the medical aspects of the Crucifixion. The physiological information in the paper struck him as inaccurate. "So I researched it out, wrote a term paper, got interested." The Shroud of Turin interested him only in that it might, were it for real, provide a great deal of information about the physiology of crucifixion. "Then I came across Barbet. I thought, Gee, this is exciting. Must be a real smart guy—

double blood flow and all that." Zugibe began doing research of his own.

One by one, Barbet's theories fell apart.

Like Barbet, Zugibe constructed a cross, which has stood—with the exception of several days during 2001 when it was out for repairs (warped stipes)—in his garage in suburban New York for some forty years. Rather than crucifying corpses, Barbet uses live volunteers, hundreds in all. For his first study, he recruited just shy of one hundred volunteers from a local religious group, the Third Order of St. Francis.

How much do you have to pay a research subject to be crucified?

Nothing. "They would have paid me," says Zugibe. "Everyone wanted to go up and see what it felt like." Granted, Zugibe was using leather straps, not nails. (Over the years, Zugibe has occasionally received calls from volunteers seeking the real deal. "Would you believe? A girl called me and wanted me to actually nail her. She's with this group where

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