Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies, by Kenneth Iserson
From the book jacket:
“A tome about every conceivable aspect of being dead, as a guide for medical professionals and an aid for people in general to decide what to have done with their bodies. Iserson himself hopes to convince people to donate them to research, but he is not pushy about it. He explores how death is determined, autopsies are done, people are cryonically preserved, heads are shrunk, corpses are transported; and why people rob graves, use coffins, cremate bodies, bury people prematurely, and use corpses in research and training. No gruesome photographs. Totally documented content with multiple footnotes, references, glossary, appendices. Available from Galen Press Ltd., PO Box 64400, Tucson, AZ 85728-4400. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR”
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As my friend Al Petrucci used to say: “Steve, don’t ever ever eat the nuts from that little dish on the bar, filthy people put their hands in there.” Al was correct about that and I’ll now amend his maxim: “Don’t ever read a book that’s advertised by the publisher as a “tome” unless its by Edgar Poe.”
Cut to logic: Why would medical professionals need a guide about what happens to dead bodies? I mean, heck, my sister is a doctor and I recall that on one of her first days of medical school they presented her with her very own cadaver which turned out to be the corpse of a woman who resembled somebody’s granddmother save that she was blue. I also seem to recall that my sister’s cadaverstill had the name tag on its toe–a mistake of course, and my poor sister had to cut open poor Edith.
Presumably this book is for the guy who swabs the hospital’s floors who has always wanted to know what happens to those poor people who check in but don’t check out.
Just donate your body for research and skip this one.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
“bury people prematurely”
Uh, what?
Yeah, I’ll be skipping this tomb, I mean, tome.
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