[b]Mary Roach
There is her heart. I’ve never seen one beating. I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It’s a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body’s animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body’s most animated organ.[/b]
Autonomically as it were.
It’s amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?
Right, like there are actually correct answers to questions like these.
According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
Imagine then flash-frozen semen.
Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you’re gone—of still being there, in a sense. I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. It’s none of their business what happens to them when they die, he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. 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 is 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 coordinators feel similarly. 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.
Got it. Now, let’s move on.
Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on “vibratory massage” and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of “a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum” he was “able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions.” Indeedy. Shropshire’s patients returned every other day for treatment, no doubt also developing a relationship with the vibration machine.
We know where this is going, don’t we?
He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants’ hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking, said Lang. Wolff had the great insight that form follows function. Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines.
Let’s file this one under, “Oh, well…”