A review of The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. 299pp. Riverhead: New York, 2006.

A refreshing slurp of the water from London’s Broad Street pump proved fatal to over six hundred people in the hot, late summer of 1854. Death acted quickly. Victims went from healthy to dead in less than a day. Corpses piled up, as did panic and confusion.

Welcome to Victorian era London in the midst of its infamous 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. The city was at cholera’s mercy, with little proper direction of how to cure the disease or stop its spread. The symptoms would begin with an upset stomach before quickly progressing into vomiting, muscle spasms, and abdominal pains. The victim’s pulse would fade, and their skin would turn blue and leathery. Most frightful of all, the victim would eject vast quantities of water flecked with tiny white particles via the bowel; rice-water stool, as it was called. Once that happened, the victim was likely to be dead in hours. Full Review »

A review of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. By Seth Mnookin. 308 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $26.99.

In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Full Review »

A review of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
320 pages
W. W. Norton & Company

What happens to us when we die? There are few activities more unsettling than the contemplation of your own mortality. Religious or not, no one relishes dwelling on the subject at length. And whatever you may think about the afterlife, the material realities of death are disconcerting to say the least. A short list of possible fates: being buried and left to rot inside a wooden box, being burned into a pile of gray ash in an industrial oven, or being taken apart bit by bit by medical students in the name of science. Regardless of the specific outcome, these are all rather disturbing destinies to consider.

Mary Roach, on the other hand, dares to tackle this taboo with raw honesty and enthusiasm. “We are biology,” she writes without equivocation. “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.” In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach explores the topic with great journalistic gusto and turns the uncomfortable subject into a quite unforgettable narrative.

Stiff is a wildly entertaining (if occasionally meandering) account of the many ways human cadavers are used, reused, and abused. Certainly not for the weak of stomach, Roach’s foray into this largely unexplored subject opens on a scene of forty disembodied human heads arranged neatly on roaster pans for a plastic surgery practice session. Drawing on extensive first-hand research, Roach then guides the reader through a menagerie of cadaveric fates, including dissection, crash-testing, forensics research, organ donation and more, while also providing captivating anecdotes from the history of anatomy. Her frank narrative style is pleasantly irreverent, yet still quite respectful, providing a tactful amount of wit and humor to a subject that might otherwise be intolerably morbid.

Full Review »

A review of Stiff: The Cuirous Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
320 pages.
W. W. Norton and Company

What happens to us when we die? There are few activities more unsettling than the contemplation of your own mortality. Religious or not, no one relishes dwelling on the subject at length. And whatever you may think about the afterlife, the material realities of death are disconcerting to say the least. A short list of possible fates: being buried and left to rot inside a wooden box, being burned into a pile of gray ash in an industrial oven, or being taken apart bit by bit by medical students in the name of science. Regardless of the specific outcome, these are all rather disturbing destinies to consider.

Mary Roach, on the other hand, dares to tackle this taboo with raw honesty and enthusiasm. “We are biology,” she writes without equivocation. “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.” In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach explores the topic with great journalistic gusto and turns the uncomfortable subject into a quite unforgettable narrative. Full Review »