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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b396200 | 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8620224 | 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| 7d5cd45 | 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." | Mary Roach | ||
| 28ea145 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| fe8a2a5 | Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don't bend. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8291dd6 | And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. For | Mary Roach | ||
| c2b6ee7 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| c981ef3 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| bc7475c | 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.)" | Mary Roach | ||
| 0abc938 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| e82c7a3 | 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 | Mary Roach | ||
| d6b0b59 | 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. .. | Mary Roach | ||
| b799f25 | 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...... | life organ-transplants soul | Mary Roach | |
| e65501a | Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort. | Mary Roach | ||
| 9ab183d | 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." | Mary Roach | ||
| 6710063 | 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| 220142b | 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 .. | Mary Roach | ||
| ffa3981 | 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." -- | Mary Roach | ||
| fbacb1d | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| f413c4e | 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." | Mary Roach | ||
| 1af5f7f | The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description. | Mary Roach | ||
| 2f20d2b | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 86a9665 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3682102 | 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" | Mary Roach | ||
| 67590c7 | 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.)" | Mary Roach | ||
| a4cede3 | 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. | Mary Roach | ||
| b7c2aa1 | She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight up from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 193fca8 | In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts. Speaking for myself, I have long felt that stones should be turned and avenues explored with a view to putting a stopper on the relatives in question. If someone were to come to me and say, 'Wooster, would you be interested in joining a society I am starting whose aim will be the suppression of aunts or.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 8dbeb9f | I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, some equally brainy bird - who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneakes up behind him with a bit of lead piping | philosophy | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 4db0a4b | This man's brother I was telling you about," said Spennie, "says there's only one rhyme in the English language to 'burglar', and that's 'gurgler'. Unless you count 'pergola', he says----" | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 1817b55 | Aunt Agatha is like an elephant- not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| b294b98 | Oh, praises let us utter To our most glorious King! It fairly makes you stutter To see him start his swing! Success attend his putter! And luck be with his drive! And may he do each hole in two, Although the bogey's five! | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6de4450 | Every man is liable on occasion to behave like a sulky schoolboy | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 66da2dd | He had that indefinable air which comes to young men who have had to make their way up from a ten-dollar start. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| d53e150 | What if he does think you the world's premier louse? Don't we all? | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 52e10e8 | I have been studying the principles of socialism deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. Ah, noble scheme! Me for it! | socialism | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| b2b472e | Until tonight I saw him only through the golden mist of love, and thought him the perfect man. This evening he revealed himself as what he really is - a satyr. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| a15d5a9 | He coughed again, that deferential cough of his which sounds like a well-bred sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 73c41fd | A man thinks he is being chilled steel - or adamant, if you prefer the expression - and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful. Samson had the same experience with Delilah. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 65380ac | Not only had its expression, as he spoke of Pauline, been that of a stuffed frog with a touch of the Soul's Awakening about it, but it | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| f308fbb | What ho, Stinker.' 'Hallo, Bertie.' 'Long time since we met.' 'It is a bit, isn't it?' 'I hear you're a curate now.' 'Yes, that's right.' 'How are the souls? | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| a62aba9 | Bayliss resumed reading. He was one of those readers who, whether their subject be a murder case or funny anecdote, adopt a measured and sepulchral delivery which gives a suggestion of tragedy and horror to whatever they read. At the church he attended, children would turn pale and snuggle up to their mothers when he read. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 9da76f8 | She threw in the last suggestion entirely in a sporting spirit. She loved battle, and she had a feeling that this one was going to finish far too quickly. To prolong it, she gave him this opening. There were a dozen ways in which he might answer, each more insulting than the last; and then, when he had finished, she could begin again. These little encounters, she held, sharpened the wits, stimulated the circulation, and kept one out in the .. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 773b6a1 | but the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young | P.G. Wodehouse |