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5af6e8d
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Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
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Mary Roach |
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d0f2fcf
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I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.
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Mary Roach |
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2436978
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Who's going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers. For this reason, anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public's mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally..
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Mary Roach |
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8b6a036
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Double sentencing wasn't a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant "quarters" being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime."
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Mary Roach |
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d2f70ba
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Gibbeting--though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds--is in fact a ghastly verb. To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.
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Mary Roach |
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321ad61
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Seventeenth-century surgeon-anatomist William Harvey, famous for discovering the human circulatory system, also deserves fame for being one of few medical men in history so dedicated to his calling that he could dissect his own father and sister.
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Mary Roach |
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6de70e6
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The Johnson Space Center "potty cam," as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you've had intimate contact with all your life but never really seen. Perhaps not unlike viewing one's home planet from space for the first time. Positioning is critical because the opening to a Space Shuttle toilet is 4 inches across, as opposed to the 18-inch maw we are accustomed to on ..
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Mary Roach |
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c427ba0
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Depending on who's living in your gut, you may or may not benefit from what you eat. Or be harmed. Charred red meat has long been called a carcinogen, but in fact it is only the raw material for making carcinogens. Without the gut bacteria that break it down, the raw goods are harmless. (This applies to drugs too; depending on the makeup of your gut flora, the efficacy of a drug may vary.) The science is new and extremely complex, but the b..
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Mary Roach |
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9af37ec
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They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don't recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: "Rice Krispies." Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies." --
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Mary Roach |
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17ad6bd
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It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, bu..
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Mary Roach |
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b396200
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Julie Rousseau said that the researchers told her they find some of her explanations far-fetched and do not consider the case closed. It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less far-fetched than a software glitch.
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Mary Roach |
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8620224
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folk ballad about a woman named Daisy who is reincarnated as a medical student whose gross anatomy cadaver turns out to be himself in a former life, i.e., Daisy.
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Mary Roach |
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7d5cd45
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To Huang Ti's credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that "the blood of the body is under the control of the heart" and that "the blood current flows in a continuous circle and never stops." In other words, the man figured out what William Harvey figured out, four thousand years before Harvey and without laying open any family members."
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Mary Roach |
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28ea145
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Now we're going to set the features," says Theo. He lifts one of the man's eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man's eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I associate most closely with cotton, the Egyptians, did not use their famous Egyptian cotton for plumping out withered eyes. The ancient Egyptians put pearl onions in there. Onions. Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garni..
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Mary Roach |
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fe8a2a5
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Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don't bend.
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Mary Roach |
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8291dd6
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And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. For
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Mary Roach |
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c2b6ee7
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Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased's ashes into inner space, that's fine. But if it's burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn't have to. McCabe's policy is to honor the wishes of the family over the wishes of the dead. Willed body program coordinator's feel similarly. 'I've had kids object to their dad's wishes [to donate],' sa..
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Mary Roach |
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c981ef3
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For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or "gross lab," as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often s..
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Mary Roach |
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bc7475c
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We were unable to obtain any lesbians," Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn't been in season, or his paperwork wasn't in order.)"
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Mary Roach |
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0abc938
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Firther evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity-sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female's head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. "Our vets have had to do rhinoplasty on some of the females", says Michaelle Stadler, a sea otter reseach coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by s..
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Mary Roach |
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e82c7a3
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This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p
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Mary Roach |
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d6b0b59
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Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. ..
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Mary Roach |
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b799f25
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I write all this with respect for the possibility that rather than some kind of contact with the consciousness of my donor's heart, these are merely hallucinations from the medications or my own projections. I know this is a very slippery slope.... What came to me in the first contact....was the horror of dying. The utter suddenness, shock, and surprise of it all....The feeling of being ripped off and the dread of dying before your time......
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life
organ-transplants
soul
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Mary Roach |
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e65501a
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Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.
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Mary Roach |
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9ab183d
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I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate)," says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "I tell them, 'Do what's best for you. You're the one who has to live with it."
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Mary Roach |
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6710063
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I tell Mark I'm glad to see some cup holders were left in place. I recognize the brief, polite silence that follows. It's Mark Roman rendered mute by the fullness of my ignorance. They're rifle holders.
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Mary Roach |
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220142b
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A brain bank spokesman showed me around. Down the hall from the dissection room was the computer room. The spokesman referred to this as the "brains of the operation" which in any other operation would have been fine but in this case was a tad confusing. At the end of the hall were the real brains. It wasn't quite what I imagined. I pictured whole intact brains floating in glass jars, but the brains were cut in half, one side being sliced ..
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Mary Roach |
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ffa3981
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If you look at survivable crashes, it's rare that even half the emergency exits open," says Shanahan. "Plus, there's a lot of panic and confusion." Shanahan cites the example of a Delta crash in Dallas. "It should have been very survivable. There were very few traumatic injuries. But a lot of people were killed by the fire. They found them stacked up at the emergency exits. Couldn't get them open." --
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Mary Roach |
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fbacb1d
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Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, "old liquified placenta" to "quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause" (I'm quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next), "clear liquid feces" for worms ("the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation"), fresh b..
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Mary Roach |
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f413c4e
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Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the "SPCA Suit"--certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man," U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. "That was a mind boggler."
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Mary Roach |
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1af5f7f
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The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.
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Mary Roach |
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2f20d2b
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H appears no different from the corpses already here. But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on Earth. To be able as a dead person to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don't manage this sort of thing while they're alive. Cadavers like H are the dead's heroes. It is astounding to me and achingly sad that with 80,000 people on the waiting list for donated hearts and liv..
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Mary Roach |
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86a9665
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Space agencies keep a firm grip on their public image, and it's less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what I write. Happily there are people involved in the human side of space exploration who see value in unconventional coverage(or are just plain too nice to say no). For their candor and wit - and the generosity with which they shared their time and know-how - super-g..
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Mary Roach |
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3682102
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Now she's coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she's going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth," he adds, and then he begins talking about something called a needle injector. I pose my own mouth to resemble the mouth of someone who is quietly horrified, and this works quite well to close Theo's mouth. The suturing proceeds in silence. Theo"
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Mary Roach |
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67590c7
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One woman confessed that her group had passed comment on the "extremely large genitalia" of their cadaver. (What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)"
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Mary Roach |
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a4cede3
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Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6 inches below the sitter's anatomy. The macerator would pulp the feces and tissue--meaning, if all went well, the paper, not the scrotal, variety--and fling it to the sides of a holding tank.
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Mary Roach |
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b19fda9
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We had no problems, no conflicts," Mars500 Commander Sergei Ryazansky is saying."
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Mary Roach |
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4911fae
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Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator d..
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Mary Roach |
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84af63e
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For Arctic nomads, eating organs has, historically, been a matter of survival. Even in summer, vegetation is sparse. Little beyond moss and lichen grows abundantly on the tundra. Organs are so vitamin-rich, and edible plants so scarce, that the former are classified, for purposes of Arctic health education, both as "meat" and as "fruits and vegetables." One serving from the Fruits and Vegetables Group in Nirlungayuk's materials is "1/2 cup ..
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Mary Roach |
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2a67327
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Liver," says Moeller. "Mixed with some other viscera. The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract." Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth. A serving of lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine. Beef lung has 50 percent more. Stomachs are especially valuable because of what's inside them. The predator benefits from the nutrients of the pla..
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Mary Roach |
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3e1505e
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Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
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Mary Roach |
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7036f64
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Presley was given laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. "I carried around three or four boxes of Fleets," Nichopoulos says, referring to the enema brand and recalling his days on tour with Presley. Getting the timing right was, he says, "a difficult balancing act." Presley sometimes did two shows a day, and Nichopoulos had to schedule the administration such that the treatments didn't kick in while the singer was on stage."
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Mary Roach |
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daebb73
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This was the low point of Presley's career: the bulky jumpsuit and isosceles sideburns era. His colon had expanded so dramatically that it crowded his diaphragm and had begun to compromise his breathing and singing. Beneath the polyester and girth, it was hard to see the man who had performed on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater, his moves so loose and frankly sexual that the producers had ordered him filmed from the waist up. Now there ..
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Mary Roach |
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3c83d3d
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People who saw the Graceland master bathroom would remark on its extravagance--a TV set! Telephones! A cushioned seat!--but the decor was in equal part a reflection of how much time was spent there. "He would be thirty minutes, an hour, in there at a time," Nichopoulos says. "He had a lot of books in there." Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB--"Taking Care of Business"--sounds like a reference to bathroom matters. (T..
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Mary Roach |