Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

These prompts can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before or after reading the book.

Pre-Reading “Icebreaker”

Stiff was written in 2004, roughly 15 years before the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. In the wake of the pandemic, research that involves cadavers (as described in Stiff) has been vital in advancing knowledge about the pandemic. Read the following three articles and discuss how they relate to the general themes of Stiff. The primary themes of the book are: The Profound Usefulness of Cadavers; Innovation and Advancement Borne from Gore; The Entanglement of Spirituality, Sacrilege, and Cultural Norms Surrounding Death.

• NPR’s “With Postmortem Testing, ‘Last Responders’ Shed Light on Pandemic’s Spread”
• MIT Technology Review’s “How a Zambian Morgue is Exposing the Real COVID Toll in Africa”
• The Daily Beast’s “This Macabre Science Could Crack the Mystery of Hearing Loss From COVID”

Teaching Suggestion: After the students read through the articles, have them discuss what they found most interesting about research involving cadavers. You may also elect to have students read and discuss the following articles that deal specifically with the medical community’s grappling with how to handle cadaver research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Morphologie’s “COVID-19 pandemic era: How risky is the continuous usage of cadavers for teaching and research?”
• Morphologie’s “Cadaverless anatomy: Darkness in the times of pandemic COVID-19”
• Anatomical Sciences Education’s “Impact on the Availability of Cadavers for Medical Education in India.”

Each of these articles underscores the importance of cadavers in scholarly medical research. Teachers should take care to explain scholarly publication process particular to the medical community; scholarly articles such as these are peer reviewed by other doctors, and they affect how medicine is practiced and what constitutes current medical knowledge.

Post-Reading Analysis

Throughout Stiff, Roach uses dark humor to help mediate the dark subject matter of cadaver research. Within the first few pages of the book, she sets the tone as irreverent and humorous saying: “[T]he way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you” (9). Think back to the various moments in the book that feature Roach’s characteristic black humor. How do they help underscore the overarching themes in the text, particularly those around our cultural attitudes around death and taboos? How does dark humor function as a literary device?

Teaching Suggestion: You can also use this question to elicit personal responses from students. Ask if they enjoy reading darkly humorous material—why or why not? Does dark humor tend to make difficult subjects more or less palatable to them? Also ask students to discuss other media that relies on dark humor and how it functions in those media. For further context and to deepen student’s understanding of how dark humor functions, both in sociological terms and as a literary device, you may elect to have students read the following:

• LitHub’s “South Park and the Dark Comedy of Our Deepest Fears”
• Slate’s “The Funniest Episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show Is a Brilliant Rumination on Death and Mourning”