Stiff summary chapter 1+2

Chapter 1+2
The first chapter names “a head is terrible thing to waste.” It addresses a practice on human heads by plastic surgeons. Mary Roach, the author of the book, went to a Southern university medical centre to observe a facial anatomy and a face-lift refresher course. The basic step to deal with human‘s heads is to be placed them in roasting pans, putting in the center of a lavender plastic cloth. Theresa is a woman whose job is to set up the seminar. Besides her, Yvonne is in charge of sawing off the head. With a facial anatomy, surgeons “elevate the skin in a subcutaneous plane from lateral to medial.” As doing it, surgeons do not feel sick because they think heads as rubber Halloween masks, but they do not relish it. Nonetheless, they value the chance to practice on human heads. Taking over the face-lift refresher course is a woman named Marilena Marignani. She divides skin layers into four sections, separating, repositioning, and then suturing them. The second chapter is about crimes of anatomy. The author stops by an anatomy lab to observe students working with stiffs and experiencing their feelings. They feel bad, but they produce attached to dead people. They name their cadavers and grow feelings of missing them when the course finishes. However, students are cautious in term of gratitude and respect because sometimes students make fun of their cadavers. The author also explains the enlargement of crime. It is due to the expansion of private medical schools in eighteenth and nineteenth century, while the number of cadavers does not boost. This results in lacking cadavers which processes to the growth of criminals. Burke and Hare are examples who sell corpses to generate their own income. They kill a guest by both pressing a pillow to the face and using the body weight laying down on the guest’s body. It is estimated that they do it fifteen times. Besides killing people, other mean applied to earn a living is digging up graves of the dead people. Overall, the demand of anatomy for cadavers causes the increase in crime.
Written by Anh Phuong Cao