Mary Roach: evaluation

Transcript context

…The economist Adam Smith in the 18th century, he actually had a view on some of these issues following Lucretius. He thought that we, sympathetically or mentally or emotionally, we associated ourselves too much with dead corpses. And we felt sorry for them, and this was a kind of defect of the sympathetic or empathetic imagination, and that we would go through life feeling sorry for all kinds of situations that actually were fully neutral. What do you see as some of the biases we have in terms of how we think about the dead and death? Well, we have a tendency — because dead people look very much like live people — there’s a tendency to project the emotions that we had previously with somebody that you know who has died. It’s a tendency to treat them as though they’re still people and to accord them the same sort of courtesies and respect. This is problematic for people who do cadaver research because there’s a tendency to say that to cut this person open, and to take their pancreas and do one thing, and send their arm over to the automotive safety lab, and take their brain over here to put them in pieces like that, and to do these sort of seemingly brutal things is disrespectful. It would be disrespectful if the person were alive. Well, it would be criminal; it would be actionable. But they’re dead; they aren’t the person anymore. And as a cadaver, they have this wonderful superpower, and that they don’t feel anything. And so, you can use them to get answers that you couldn’t in any other way because you don’t want to do that to a live person. So we trip over this fact that “they look like people,” which is why frequently the face is covered, the hands are covered. Even in surgical practice labs, there’s a lingering tendency to depersonalize and dehumanize the body. I’m a fan of the Zoroastrian practice in Mumbai of having my dead corpse carried away by birds in pieces. If I could have my wish at zero cost, I think that’s what I would opt for. But let me give you a general sense I get when reading a lot of your work, and you tell me if there’s anything to it. I think of a lot of the books, in a funny way, as a kind of response to actually Catholic philosophy, this notion of the incorruptibility of the body. It’s in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology. There’s a notion that relics of saints, they don’t corrupt — or you can revisit and it will still be intact in some manner. And that you’re writing a kind of scientific polemic against that, giving us some different conception of the body, coming out of a response to Catholicism. Is that at all in what you’re doing?…

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