Introduction. - 1. A head is a terrible thing to waste: practicing surgery on the dead - 2. Crimes of anatomy: body-snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection -3. Life after death: on human decay and what can be done about it - 4. Dead man driving: human crash test dummies and the ghastly, necessary science of impact tolerance - 5. Beyond the black box: when the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash - 6. The cadaver who joined the army: the sticky ethics of bullets and bombs - 7. Holy cadaver: the crucifixion experiments - 8. How to know if you're dead: beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul - 9. Just a head: decapitation, reanimation, and the human head transplant - 10. Eat me: medicinal cannibalism and the case of the human dumplings - 11. Out of the fire, into the compost bin: and other new ways to end up - 12. Remains of the author: will she or won't she? - Acknowledgements. - Bibliography.

Human anatomy, cytology, histology