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288 pages, Hardcover
First published April 12, 2022
The role of the medical cadaver is to give the student a map of a body in working order.So later they will have a basis line to see
What an abnormality looks like, and Lara can show them the reality of a diagnosis: what telling someone they have cancer actually means, what cirrhosis of the liver looks like, what obesity means for your cramped organs.It is true that inside every fat person there is a thin one struggling to get out. Our rib cage, our pelvis, our bones never grow past adulthood. I must try and let my thin person out some time. Or since I am on a permanent diet (it was 10lb then Covid lockdown and now it's 20lb) try harder!
Workers, still combing through the charred remains, found a fish tank in the blackened tower. Somehow, despite the lack of food, electricity to oxygenate their water, and the twenty-three dead fish floating belly up above them, seven fish still lived.
The family from the flat were contacted but were unable to house them in their current situation, so with their blessing, one of the Kenyon staff adopted the fish. They even managed to breed, resulting in the most unlikely thing to rise from the ashes of a burned building: a baby fish. They called it Phoenix.
There was only one section I didn't enjoy and ended up skimming, cryonics, freezing corpses in the hope of technology one day being able to revive them back into life. Other than that, the book was very enjoyable, well-written and the author's personality shone through, a very interesting and likeable person despite the OCD over the dead baby. 4 star in reality. But given 5 because it was such a good and often enlightening read.
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Reading notes Reading this as I like books on death - funeral directors, hospices, embalming, cremation (but I can't get the vision out of my head of fat people's avoirdupois turning into liquid oil and running down the middle of the drain in the crematorium. I can't remember which book that came from, probably Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, that was pretty gruesome). I don't know why I like these books but they must be quite generally appealing as it's quite a big genre. Maybe it is to allay feelings of my own mortality or to reinforce them. But I'm with Woody Allen on this one, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
“If the reason we’re outsourcing this burden is because it’s too much for us, how do they deal with it?”Campbell interviews many different people associated with death - a funeral director, the director of anatomical services at Mayo Clinic, an embalmer, a crime scene cleaner, a death mask maker, an executioner, anatomic pathology technologist, bereavement midwife, gravediggers, crematorium operator, and even people at a cryonics institute. I learned that there are many more people involved with death than I ever thought, and with their varied viewpoints, I also learned that it's far more than just a job to many of them. The care and respect they feel and show in their work is evident, even if it's work that most people will never see and may not be appreciated. There are a few morbid details, but Campbell gets involved in some of these details, such as dressing a corpse, handling a brain during an autopsy, and raking remains from the crematorium. This helps to make them seem just a little less morbid.
"The world is full of people telling you how to feel about death and dead bodies, and I don't want to be one of them - I don't want to tell you how to feel about anything, I only want you to think about it."Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book.