Speaker 1: Taboo science Science.
Speaker 2: Hi, Taboo Science listeners. While we're in between new episodes
Speaker 2: of the show, I wanted to introduce you to one
Speaker 2: of my very favorite podcasts. It's called Sing for Science,
Speaker 2: and it's what happens when you put a famous musician
Speaker 2: with a nerdy streak in a room with a scientist
Speaker 2: and record their conversation. Some of my favorite episodes have
Speaker 2: been wilco's Jeff Tweety talking about consciousness with Cornell computational
Speaker 2: psychologist doctor Shimon Edelman, Jose Gonzalez talking secular humanism with
Speaker 2: physicist Brian Cox, and Casey Musgraves talking psilocybin with my
Speaker 2: cologist Paul Stammetz. It was actually really hard to choose
Speaker 2: just one episode to share, but because Halloween is approaching,
Speaker 2: you are going to hear this fascinating conversation between Korn's
Speaker 2: Jonathan Davis and my science writing idol Mary Roach, all
Speaker 2: about mortuary science. It is taboo science, indeed, I hope
Speaker 2: you enjoy.
Speaker 3: Singh for Science is made possible in part by support
Speaker 3: from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Today's
Speaker 3: episode was recorded remotely from Bakersfield, California, and Oakland, California,
Speaker 3: and it contains content related to mortuary science that some
Speaker 3: listeners may find disturbing. Be sure to check out our
Speaker 3: other episodes, and please enjoy the show.
Speaker 1: When I crack a brain a head open, it was decomposed,
Speaker 1: the brain was liquefied with soup, and.
Speaker 4: It comes out the ears. Someone told me sometimes it
Speaker 4: kind of bubbles out the ears.
Speaker 1: If you cut into the skull and you cracked the
Speaker 1: skull cap off.
Speaker 4: It's soup. Yeah. And then there's something called frothy purge,
Speaker 4: which I love lingo. I love the lingo of science,
Speaker 4: and there were some great ones.
Speaker 1: Frothy per It just bubbles come out of there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right right, the bubble's coming out. You've got your
Speaker 4: plane purge, your frothy purgey. Nun one one nine.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Sing for Science, the show where musicians and
Speaker 3: scientists talk about music and science. I'm your host, Matt White.
Speaker 3: Each week we'll talk about a song by our guest
Speaker 3: artist and how it connects with our guest scientists area
Speaker 3: of expertise. Today, we'll be speaking with Jonathan Davis, frontman
Speaker 3: of the pioneering metal band corn Korn's most commercially successful album,
Speaker 3: was nineteen ninety eight's followed the Leader, having hit number
Speaker 3: one across four charts and sold over fourteen million albums worldwide.
Speaker 3: The album's fourth track is called Dead Bodies Everywhere and
Speaker 3: was inspired in part by Jonathan's job working in a
Speaker 3: morgue before his music career took off. Also joining us
Speaker 3: is best selling popular science writer Mary Roach. Mary is
Speaker 3: the author of a string of one word science books,
Speaker 3: including Spook, Bonk, and Fuzz. The first in this series
Speaker 3: is two thousand and three Stiff The Curious Lives of
Speaker 3: Human Cadavers, and won Mary several awards and critical distinctions.
Speaker 3: Her reporting not only details the unique scientific contributions of
Speaker 3: the deceased, but also provides elaborate explanations into the process
Speaker 3: of tissue decay and how mortuary science works to stall it.
Speaker 3: The title of this week's episode on the podcast is
Speaker 3: Dead Bodies Everywhere post Mortem Biology and Funerary Science. Hello,
Speaker 3: Jonathan and Mary, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for having us.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't consider myself a morbid person, but
Speaker 3: this is a dream come true. I gotta tell you.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've been trying to find a reason to
Speaker 3: have both of you on the show for a while,
Speaker 3: and when I found out that you Jonathan used to
Speaker 3: not only work in a morgue, but also wrote a
Speaker 3: song related to that experience. So yeah, I mean the
Speaker 3: whole thing practically writes itself.
Speaker 1: For total songs about working there. What was the other one?
Speaker 1: There's one? Uh, pretty Oh that was when I worked
Speaker 1: a Uh it was an intense case. When I worked
Speaker 1: at the corner's office. We can get in that later,
Speaker 1: but there's that. And then the dead bodies was overflowing
Speaker 1: the morg when I worked at the mortuary.
Speaker 3: Okay, so dead bodies everywhere kind of spells out pretty
Speaker 3: clearly what must have been like to work in a morgue.
Speaker 3: But I know there's more to the song than just
Speaker 3: about that, can you.
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, when I worked at the mortuary, my kitchen
Speaker 1: was overflowed for the morg There's literally dead bodies were
Speaker 1: everywhere when the morgue was fooled, and we would put
Speaker 1: some more into my kitchen, which I had a little
Speaker 1: apartment in the mortuary when we had too many, too
Speaker 1: many bodies or too many you know, bodies were backed up.
Speaker 1: We're waiting for funerals after we get done in bombing them.
Speaker 1: They would have to put them on, you know, on
Speaker 1: the tables, and they'd sit there waiting to get dressed
Speaker 1: and put in the caskets and all this stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So sometimes we get a lot of cases. And then
Speaker 1: my overflow was my kitchen and literally I come out
Speaker 1: of my bedroom when there's dead b everywhere. Holy shit.
Speaker 4: So it's good that they were embombed already. That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you don't want to know, you know, because that
Speaker 4: could be fragrant.
Speaker 1: Desumps are not fun.
Speaker 3: No, And so was this in Bakersfield? Yeah, because it's
Speaker 3: hot there, so you don't want a message.
Speaker 1: But they were bomb. What's here in bomb? They're fine?
Speaker 3: Were you still a teenager when you had this job.
Speaker 1: I first started doing posts when I was seventeen years old, Yes,
Speaker 1: and that was at the corner's office. And then from
Speaker 1: there I graduated high school and went directly to San
Speaker 1: Francisco College Mortuary science.
Speaker 4: Oh I went there was Mac there.
Speaker 1: Mac was Mac was my my chemistry and a teacher. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He had this big kidney stone in his
Speaker 1: class that he said he they took out or pat
Speaker 1: It was ginormous. He was.
Speaker 3: I knew that there was going to be a gazillion
Speaker 3: points of connection that.
Speaker 1: This is a small little clique, it's a small small industry.
Speaker 3: So how did you get drawn into that world in
Speaker 3: the first place.
Speaker 1: I just always, since I think from I can remember,
Speaker 1: I was always drawn towards darker things. Those things intrigued
Speaker 1: me and still intrigue me. I mean, I'm going to
Speaker 1: love happiness and light and all that stuff too, but
Speaker 1: also there's the dark. And at that point in my mind,
Speaker 1: I was like thinking, Oh, when I was in high school,
Speaker 1: I went to this thing called Regional Occupation Program and
Speaker 1: they had the Corner's Office is one of the things
Speaker 1: you could go do. A lot of people were studying
Speaker 1: to go be X ray text or respiratory therapists, but
Speaker 1: I chose autopsy assistant. Wow, And it wasn't like a
Speaker 1: oh school, go just jump in there. I had to
Speaker 1: go through three different interviews and go through a psychological
Speaker 1: back and they I did all this stuff, all these
Speaker 1: different interviews and all this stuff to be able to
Speaker 1: do that, and I passed all of them. And I
Speaker 1: started my junior year of high school as an autopsy
Speaker 1: assistant for the County Corner's Office.
Speaker 3: And so do you remember your first autopsy, like yesterday.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget that. It was like you came face
Speaker 1: to face with mortality right there. It's like, and I
Speaker 1: learned it in college that America is a death denying society.
Speaker 1: We all think we're going to live forever, but when
Speaker 1: you're staring death right in the face. And this wasn't
Speaker 1: a very nice one. This was a car accident and
Speaker 1: this person was pretty beat up. It really shocked me.
Speaker 1: And I'll never forget the sound of a scalpel cutting flesh.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget the first time I saw the viscera
Speaker 1: lane opening up in a ye incision and seeing the
Speaker 1: vispery all there. I'll never forget those thing's doctor going
Speaker 1: there taking samples and then me having to sew them up.
Speaker 1: Just like. It really affected me.
Speaker 3: I mean, how could it not. It's just reality, Yeah,
Speaker 3: but dead bodies everywhere. There's another component to it. It
Speaker 3: seems like it addresses your relationship with your parents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, because of it, Like they wanted me to
Speaker 1: do this or that, like you need to get a
Speaker 1: go real job. That kind of just the normal stuff
Speaker 1: parents do. Because I'm a parent, I want my son
Speaker 1: to be successful. My sons to be successful, and they
Speaker 1: just wanted me to get a normal job, and I'm
Speaker 1: not normal. I guess what they a't on those terms.
Speaker 1: I chose to be a mortician or an autopsy assistant
Speaker 1: because I'm really, in my heart I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a musician, but they were pushing me, No, you can't.
Speaker 1: You're not going to make it as a musician. You
Speaker 1: need to have a real job. That kind of vine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they kind of like pushed me into that. And then
Speaker 1: in turn, and I've always said this, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: been doing autopsies at seventeen years old. I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: seen the things I saw at seventeen years old, because
Speaker 1: it really missed me up. I had nightmares for a
Speaker 1: long time. I had all kinds of stuff that I
Speaker 1: had to work through because I was subjected to this
Speaker 1: horrifying things that I saw at such an early age,
Speaker 1: but no one knew at the time, and I was
Speaker 1: really enjoyed it in the line on myself, but I
Speaker 1: saw some really bad stuff I shouldn't have seen.
Speaker 3: In the timeline of Korn's career. That was what five
Speaker 3: years before your first record, So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was I worked at the mortuary when you
Speaker 1: see eighty nine went to Mortuary colleg ninety one ninety two,
Speaker 1: ninety three. I was doing my apprenticeship at the mortuary
Speaker 1: and I was a volunteer deputy corner and doing autopsies
Speaker 1: sometimes when they needed my home. And then my apprenticeship
Speaker 1: ended and I got the opportunity to go try out
Speaker 1: for this band and was did turn out to be
Speaker 1: Corn and I just left it all behind after that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to go with my heart. What I really really want.
Speaker 3: To do is be a musician, right, And I was
Speaker 3: just looking at your last tour. I mean, you guys
Speaker 3: are still doing arenas. I mean, not many people get
Speaker 3: to do that besides Stones. Yeah, I don't know. It's
Speaker 3: just amazing.
Speaker 1: I'm very lucky to be just twenty eight years and
Speaker 1: I'm still playing amphitheaters and arenas, and I'm very very lucky.
Speaker 1: I know this.
Speaker 3: It's incredible. And what's interesting is it seems like you
Speaker 3: acknowledge that you've always kind of been drawn to the
Speaker 3: darker elements. And I dug up this profile of you guys,
Speaker 3: or maybe it was just a view from Melody Maker
Speaker 3: maybe late nineties, and they call you a quote an
Speaker 3: icon for the disturbed and dispossessed, you know, which kind
Speaker 3: of tracks with someone who might have had a job
Speaker 3: in a morgue. But they also they talk about your performance,
Speaker 3: and it was talking about the way that you were
Speaker 3: on stage and you were kicking, and it was kind
Speaker 3: of a withdrawn way of processing emotions. And I I
Speaker 3: watched a recent show of you guys, there was something
Speaker 3: so incredibly life affirming about it and open and positive,
Speaker 3: and not to say that the former maybe didn't have
Speaker 3: those elements, and I realized that was a much different
Speaker 3: chapter in your life. But I think it's worth remarking
Speaker 3: on that you're able to kind of combine those elements
Speaker 3: and you're still singing songs called dead Bodies everywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, it's the way I've dealt with everything I've
Speaker 1: been through in my life. I've had a very happy
Speaker 1: life and now it's amazing. I mean, but I think
Speaker 1: it's like everybody. We have our ups and downs, and
Speaker 1: I choose to do my art on the darker stuff
Speaker 1: in my life and it really moves me. So when
Speaker 1: I get up there and sing those songs, I'm just
Speaker 1: letting loose. I let loose, I just go somewhere else,
Speaker 1: I let all the emotions come out, and then when
Speaker 1: I'm done, I just kick back and I'm happy because
Speaker 1: I don't have any of this stuff built up inside me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just how I've figured out how to get through
Speaker 1: my life.
Speaker 3: It's a beautiful thing to see, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it sounds like maybe just some degree, you're able
Speaker 3: to compartmentalize a lot of these interests. I mean, do
Speaker 3: you still have some interest in mortuary science.
Speaker 1: I mean I collect all kinds of stuff. I still
Speaker 1: love mortuary science. I have a bunch of of old
Speaker 1: mortuary equipment and stuff like that. I love medical preparations.
Speaker 1: I collect those old ones, old quack medicine stuff. There's
Speaker 1: all these different ones. There's these it's stupid, but I
Speaker 1: got like these just quack medicine stuff. This is a
Speaker 1: perfect one. These crazy box of rectal plugs are supposed
Speaker 1: to help you cure asthma and insomnia. Just funny, just
Speaker 1: I love that old quack medicine stuff.
Speaker 4: Bougies they call them bougies.
Speaker 3: Bougies is that those.
Speaker 4: Are the real dilators. And they would sell them in kits,
Speaker 4: like they'd get bigger and bigger, like you could have
Speaker 4: the advanced rectal dilator.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which should be like you graduate, wow after so long? Yeah,
Speaker 1: just stuff like that I like to collect. I have
Speaker 1: a bunch of of like haunted artifacts and all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff, more of the Macob stuff. That's just it
Speaker 1: inspires me and I love being around it.
Speaker 3: What's your source? Like? Is it an eBay? Do you
Speaker 3: look for that kind of thing?
Speaker 1: Just stuff finds me? Man, I swear yeah, I'm it
Speaker 1: really does. I don't actively go looking, but most of
Speaker 1: the stuff I founding my hunted doll stuff like that.
Speaker 1: It's because I go around like town and when I'm
Speaker 1: on tour, I'm gonna ask what is one thing in
Speaker 1: here that makes you feel the most uneasy? And there's
Speaker 1: always something. Oh, come here and not buy that.
Speaker 3: Were you familiar with Mary's book? Had that ever come
Speaker 3: across your desk?
Speaker 1: No? But I definitely want to check some of your
Speaker 1: books out. Well.
Speaker 3: This one is an amazing book. I got it for
Speaker 3: Christmas when it came out in two thousand and three
Speaker 3: or four, and it's still, not surprisingly, one of the
Speaker 3: most memorable books I've ever read. I can still retell
Speaker 3: certain passages. So, Mary, what stands out in your mind
Speaker 3: because exhaustive research went into this. You're visiting morgues, you're
Speaker 3: visiting crash tests with cadavers, you're visiting this body farm,
Speaker 3: which is insane. What stands out in your memory twenty
Speaker 3: years later, I.
Speaker 4: Think the I guess the body farm. But I was
Speaker 4: gonna say the very first chapter I reported was at
Speaker 4: the mortuary college that Jonathan went to, and it was
Speaker 4: the first time I'd seen a body other than I
Speaker 4: had a job as a janitor at college where I
Speaker 4: grew up in high school. I was a cleaner, but
Speaker 4: one time I got assigned to the morgue. But those
Speaker 4: bodies were all under these kind of clear plastic tarps,
Speaker 4: so it was which was kind of creepier in a
Speaker 4: way because it was dark, it was after hours, and
Speaker 4: I was like with my broom. So that's actually technically
Speaker 4: the first dead bodies I've seen. But the one that
Speaker 4: I saw, okay, the one that they were being trained
Speaker 4: on was a body. It was a reject. You know,
Speaker 4: this guy had donated himself to medical science, but he
Speaker 4: was rejected because he had an autopsy. So he's got
Speaker 4: this See he's like his torso is just like a
Speaker 4: gaping red hole, and I'm not prepared for that. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, heay, you know, with the viscera bag, but
Speaker 4: without the organs, you know, they're in the bag, and
Speaker 4: it's this just this blood red shell. And I realized
Speaker 4: years later because for a few days after that, that
Speaker 4: image kept popping into my head and I was thinking,
Speaker 4: maybe this book wasn't such a smart maybe I'm not
Speaker 4: okay with this.
Speaker 1: But again two.
Speaker 4: Days, three days later, the images started going away. But
Speaker 4: that is I realized much later. That's something people with
Speaker 4: PTSD have that, or these really gruesome things like that
Speaker 4: they've seen pop into their head. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you ever had.
Speaker 1: That, Jonathan, Yeah, a lot, because I did autopsy babies,
Speaker 1: oh Man, and toddlers in five and six year old children.
Speaker 1: I did autopsy on this little boy and we opened
Speaker 1: up this stomach. Can found a bag of rock cocaine
Speaker 1: in it that he ingested.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I saw just things like I said that. Oh, it
Speaker 1: still gets to me. I have children that just like. Oh,
Speaker 1: I became such a hard I had no feeling and
Speaker 1: I hated that I had to have no feelings. I
Speaker 1: want to insane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know this woman I met years later she's
Speaker 4: the medical examiner for Oakland, California. We have a lot
Speaker 4: of pretty grizzly crime here in Oakland. Yeah, and she
Speaker 4: she said, Okay, you know, I think she made it
Speaker 4: a personal goal to make me gag, which I had
Speaker 4: never you know, people would say, did this book, did
Speaker 4: you ever throw up? I'm like, nah, you know, I'm pretty,
Speaker 4: I'm not squeamish. But she brought me in and there
Speaker 4: were these I don't I don't know why I'm telling
Speaker 4: you this. That really wasn't the question. But there was
Speaker 4: these two people who had been found in an apartment
Speaker 4: after I don't know. They were very bloated. They were
Speaker 4: big people to begin with, and they were in that
Speaker 4: bloat stage and she cut them open, and the smell
Speaker 4: the world. Oh my god. I mean, I gaged. I've
Speaker 4: never gagged in my life. I think of myself as
Speaker 4: somebody pretty macho when it comes to things that are gross.
Speaker 4: I left the room and she was like, what's the
Speaker 4: big deal. It's just like changing a diaper.
Speaker 1: I'm like, no, it's not diapers. Smell that smell. It's horrible.
Speaker 3: And in your book you describe what is it the
Speaker 3: root of that smell? I've never smelled anything beyond like
Speaker 3: a dead road kill. Yeah, but could you talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about that. What's what's going on there?
Speaker 4: Well, what's going on basically is that when you die,
Speaker 4: your cells have these enzymes and they you know, they
Speaker 4: need to break things down so they can use them.
Speaker 4: And when you die, they start these enzymes sort of
Speaker 4: break down the cells themselves, so all the liquid in
Speaker 4: all your cells kind of leaks out and you get
Speaker 4: sort of gushy and there's a lot of fluid going
Speaker 4: everywhere and bacteria love that. So the bacteria are going
Speaker 4: crazy and the fluids making its way to the parts
Speaker 4: of the where there's a lot of bacteria. The guts.
Speaker 4: You know, once the guts open up in the there's
Speaker 4: just this crazy bacterial feast. And bacteria when they're eating, uh,
Speaker 4: they're like you. They break things down and a fart. Basically,
Speaker 4: they they produce gas as you do when you eat
Speaker 4: and digest. So they're digesting and they're releasing tons of gas,
Speaker 4: which builds up and at some point your interior organs
Speaker 4: may burst and so there's just a lot of room
Speaker 4: for the gas to be going everywhere. So the things
Speaker 4: that tend to be bloating. Are places where there's a
Speaker 4: lot of bacteria, like the scrotum and the mouth and
Speaker 4: the guts, so there's you know, I haven't discussed this
Speaker 4: in a long time. I've like I just reread it.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, anyway, that's what's going on, and putre
Speaker 4: faction is just more breaking down and liquefying. And at
Speaker 4: the body farm, you would see in the advanced ages
Speaker 4: of putre faction, it's kind of like a puddle all
Speaker 4: around you kind of compared it to like in the
Speaker 4: Wizard of Oz, the bad which is melting. You know,
Speaker 4: this is becoming this pool. Yeah, so you're just becoming liquid,
Speaker 4: except for of course you're depending on the how dry
Speaker 4: it is. You know, your skin and bones take longer.
Speaker 4: You're that's the last thing to go, you know. The
Speaker 4: wetter stuff is like the brain goes, the eyes go fat.
Speaker 4: The wet stuff goes first, and then the harder stuff
Speaker 4: takes longer time to break down. And there's bugs that
Speaker 4: help with that and sometimes rodents, so you know, the
Speaker 4: whole thing ends up getting broken down though, one way
Speaker 4: or another.
Speaker 3: Could you tell Jonathan about the body farm what the
Speaker 3: body farm was?
Speaker 4: Oh? Sure, sure. The body Farm. There's a place at
Speaker 4: University of Tennessee. Was the original That's where I went,
Speaker 4: and Stiff there's now there's like everywhere. They have them
Speaker 4: in different environments because it's a place to study the
Speaker 4: forensics of human decay, and that is something that is
Speaker 4: used to try to solve crimes, like say you have
Speaker 4: a body and you want to figure out how long
Speaker 4: has this person been dead? How long have they been
Speaker 4: lying there? In order to understand that, you've got to
Speaker 4: factor in the temperature. Was the body wet, is it dries?
Speaker 4: Is a very humid place or a very arid place.
Speaker 4: Was the body clothed? Was it naked? Was it in water?
Speaker 4: All of these things affect the timeline of decay. So
Speaker 4: they study that and that information informs the criminal forensics process,
Speaker 4: the process of figuring out how long this person has
Speaker 4: been dead. So the body farm is the place where
Speaker 4: they study that, and they've been doing that for years
Speaker 4: because it used to be, you know, sometimes they were
Speaker 4: way off and then they'd be a body would be
Speaker 4: discovered and they'd say, yeah, this looks like six weeks,
Speaker 4: and it would be like twenty five years, because it
Speaker 4: just depends on Sometimes bodies are naturally preserved by the environment.
Speaker 4: You know, if it's very air, they kind of mummify
Speaker 4: and they don't look soupy and they don't you know,
Speaker 4: break down completely. So anyway, that's the Body Farm. But
Speaker 4: what I loved about it is that it's this beautiful
Speaker 4: little patch of land, like off beyond beyond the medical center.
Speaker 4: It's got hickory trees and squirrels, and it's really like
Speaker 4: you walk in and you're like, Oh, this doesn't seem
Speaker 4: that bad, you know, and then then they're like, oh,
Speaker 4: there's a guy taking a nap over there under a tree,
Speaker 4: and they're just placed here and there kind of like
Speaker 4: it doesn't look like a scientific facility. Like there's a
Speaker 4: guy lying under a tree and they were studying the
Speaker 4: effect of clothing that day, so he's wearing like sweatpants
Speaker 4: and a sweatshirt and it really just sort of looked
Speaker 4: like a guy napping, except that weird stillness that dead
Speaker 4: people have.
Speaker 3: And so were they kind of grouped by where they're
Speaker 3: at in the process of decay? Was that right?
Speaker 4: Well, it depends on what they're studying. Like there's a
Speaker 4: section where they have domestic beetles. They clean bones, so there.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure if they were processing just clear cleaning
Speaker 4: skeletons for some reason. There's like the neighborhood of skeletons,
Speaker 4: and then the other ones they were you know, like
Speaker 4: the clothed guy was under a tree and then there
Speaker 4: was a woman that you would kind of walk through
Speaker 4: the They weren't arranged in any It was like, what what,
Speaker 4: what's your project? You know, kind of stake out your land.
Speaker 4: And some of them had a covering to keep scavengers out,
Speaker 4: but most of them were just kind of lie and
Speaker 4: they're dead. Jonathan, you would love it.
Speaker 1: I would actually, And there's one now.
Speaker 4: There's one in California. There's one in the Central Valley.
Speaker 4: Because they want them in different like they would want
Speaker 4: like a dry, arid place and then some a humid place,
Speaker 4: you know. So there's one in the Midwest. There's one
Speaker 4: in New England now, but the original was in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Earlier you mentioned that the brain and the eyes, that
Speaker 3: those go pretty fast because they're so liquidity, and so
Speaker 3: what happens the there's just a vacant spot where the
Speaker 3: eye once was. You describe them as X's in the book.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they the eye does have that kind of the
Speaker 4: pupil because it kind of collapses, so they don't have
Speaker 4: that dark black area. They kind of just look it's
Speaker 4: they're very it's very weird. I asked this guy at
Speaker 4: the mortuary college, I'm like, how did you decide to
Speaker 4: get into this? And he said, well, this is back
Speaker 4: before pagers and cell phones. He said, you know, you
Speaker 4: could have a free apartment upstairs from the mortuary because
Speaker 4: you had to be there on call when the body
Speaker 4: came in. It was like free room and board.
Speaker 1: When I went to college, is like, I got free
Speaker 1: room and board. Well I had I had to buy food,
Speaker 1: but I got a free room and woke up and
Speaker 1: went to school. Well, they came back and I just
Speaker 1: had to do removals at night. We were on call,
Speaker 1: so we stayed and lived in the mortuary.
Speaker 3: What was the process of removals?
Speaker 1: Like, well, you just you get a call, you'd get
Speaker 1: the address and you'd go pick someone up who passed away.
Speaker 1: It was it's tricky, especially in some of the places
Speaker 1: in San Francisco and the Mission and all that. I
Speaker 1: got a call and I went and this was a
Speaker 1: really big person too, through hundred pounds and I couldn't
Speaker 1: get them, and then we had to go down a
Speaker 1: spiral staircase because there was no way out because those
Speaker 1: old buildings away they were built, so we had to
Speaker 1: strap them on there and we had to get family
Speaker 1: members and other people in the building just to help. Well.
Speaker 1: I think one time we called the fire department just
Speaker 1: to help get them out and get them into the car,
Speaker 1: and then once I got them to the removal van,
Speaker 1: take them to the mortuary. How am I going to get this?
Speaker 1: There was always this how am I going to get
Speaker 1: this person out? But then there was other ones where
Speaker 1: it's really simple. You'd go and in it was just an
Speaker 1: easy removal and bring them in, to take them into
Speaker 1: the embombing room and leave them for the embalmer to come.
Speaker 1: Because I couldn't embomb then it was just an apprentice.
Speaker 1: I was just going to school. I wasn't even apprentice yet.
Speaker 1: But when I worked at the other mortuary, when I
Speaker 1: was an apprentice, I have to always when I was
Speaker 1: in bombing, I had to have the embommer there with
Speaker 1: me to watch me.
Speaker 3: Okay, I used to live by this park in Brooklyn
Speaker 3: and there were a lot of alcoholics who would expire
Speaker 3: in the park. It would happen from time to time.
Speaker 3: And one time I went out for a walk and
Speaker 3: there was a guy who was clearly late stages of alcoholism,
Speaker 3: and he was kind of looked like he was lying
Speaker 3: down across the street from my apartment. I went up
Speaker 3: to ask if he was okay, and he kind of
Speaker 3: grunted at me, and I went off to the park,
Speaker 3: and as I was walking away, I just like my
Speaker 3: mind was putting together what I just seen. I was
Speaker 3: just like, that did not make sense. So I went
Speaker 3: back and literally in three minutes he was dead right.
Speaker 3: But because it wasn't a crime, and because he had
Speaker 3: no family, it fell into this weird pocket in New
Speaker 3: York City where it was just only the coroner could
Speaker 3: remove the body, not an ambulance, not a cop, And
Speaker 3: so the corner in New York City, as you can imagine,
Speaker 3: was very backed up. So what they had to do
Speaker 3: was just have a cop sit in a car just
Speaker 3: next to the body until the coroner could come pick
Speaker 3: it up. And so it was just laying there all
Speaker 3: day long under a sheet.
Speaker 1: I believe it.
Speaker 3: So you started to talk about embalming, which is one
Speaker 3: of the other things that that I'd like to talk
Speaker 3: about here. So you what do you remember about that process.
Speaker 1: It's just like you're replacing the blood in the body
Speaker 1: with embombing fluid, which is from aldehyde and the chemical.
Speaker 4: They look so much better.
Speaker 1: They look way better.
Speaker 4: Once I want to be bombed.
Speaker 1: Once you plumps, once you put the fluid in, you
Speaker 1: just like yeah, and it makes it gives you color.
Speaker 1: Got color in it, right, Yeah, it's got coloring.
Speaker 4: It's like an amazing transformation.
Speaker 1: It makes everything, It freezes everything, so when you touch
Speaker 1: the skin, there's none of this. Right, it's just like
Speaker 1: hard as a rock if you do it right. And
Speaker 1: how it depends on the pressure, how much you're you're
Speaker 1: getting into the capillaries and the tissue, how much you massage.
Speaker 1: So basically real short, if it's normal, if it's not
Speaker 1: an autopsy, you make an decision right here on your
Speaker 1: on your the bone right here, and you dissect and
Speaker 1: you get the jugular and the carotid army, right, you'll
Speaker 1: inject into there using an em bombing machine which acts
Speaker 1: like a heart, and you're gonna pump that fluid into
Speaker 1: the body and use the jugular vein. You have a
Speaker 1: pair of foresteps and have a pair of amroun here somewhere,
Speaker 1: and you go down the jugular into the heart kind
Speaker 1: area and you're pulling the cloths out. You just sit
Speaker 1: there and leave that vein open and you let the
Speaker 1: embombing machine do its work. It's gonna pump the embombing
Speaker 1: fluid in and push the blood out, and while that's
Speaker 1: going on, you cover the body and soap and you
Speaker 1: start massaging. So if you're shooting down on the blue,
Speaker 1: you're gonna start massaging up from the hands because you
Speaker 1: want to get the blood out, So you're gonna massage
Speaker 1: the entire body. You're going to try and get the
Speaker 1: blood out of the body and get the fluid in
Speaker 1: so it gets into the capillaries and it totally gets
Speaker 1: in saturates the tissue with this from aldehyde, which then
Speaker 1: like it sanitizes the body and totally preserves it.
Speaker 4: Kind of an amazing idea to use the human circulatory
Speaker 4: system to get that fluid everywhere to all your cells.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's brilliant, you know, because I don't know
Speaker 4: the early the mummification is kind of like, you know,
Speaker 4: you pack the body in something and you maybe stuff
Speaker 4: so down the mouth. But this like this to have
Speaker 4: that idea to pump like a heart, Like Jonathan said,
Speaker 4: you're you know, replacing the blood with this preservative that
Speaker 4: kind of links the proteins together. It just basically keeps
Speaker 4: bacteria from being able to break the cells down the
Speaker 4: way they normally would. It also kills them. But that's
Speaker 4: a brilliant idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3: The jugular is that the same thing as the a order.
Speaker 4: No, that's your heart, the big in your ches heart artery.
Speaker 1: It goes all the way down into your.
Speaker 3: What's the jugular? This is a vein that's.
Speaker 4: In your neck.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the jugglars are vein, so your arteries is
Speaker 1: oxygenated blood. And then the jugular is when the part's
Speaker 1: pumping the the carbon dioxide blood. I call it out.
Speaker 1: So you're going in do they crotted and out through
Speaker 1: the jugular?
Speaker 3: And Mary in your book you talk about it looked
Speaker 3: like the end of a whoopee cushion, Right, It was
Speaker 3: that wide.
Speaker 4: It did to me, like the guy THEO if you
Speaker 4: raise the artery, I think it was the artery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the crodit Yeah, they're connected together like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The end of it to me looked like what
Speaker 4: you blow on a whoopee cushion. I mean it's big.
Speaker 4: It's like a gronken big tube.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there two twos. It's hard. You gotta dissect
Speaker 1: them apart. But and that's if they haven't been autopsy. Now,
Speaker 1: if their autopsy is a total different thing, because the
Speaker 1: pathology has gone on there and just ripped everything out.
Speaker 1: So there's no surety exactly.
Speaker 4: It's a mess.
Speaker 1: So now you got to do. If you can find
Speaker 1: the karate, you'll shoot up just for this side of
Speaker 1: the head. You'll shoot down here and these arteries here
Speaker 1: just to do the arm, and you'll shoot down the
Speaker 1: arteries of the legs to get that. So you're doing one, two, three, four,
Speaker 1: six points of injectory.
Speaker 4: Because you don't have a closed system anymore.
Speaker 1: You don't have a closed system. Oh and also once
Speaker 1: you get done embalming, then you have to go in
Speaker 1: with this stuff called cavity fluid. Use this giant troll
Speaker 1: cards called the troll car. It's a giant spike and
Speaker 1: you have aspiration to so it's sucking. It's like a suction.
Speaker 1: And you go there and you just try to make
Speaker 1: mince meat of all the organs in there so they
Speaker 1: can't blow up, Like you said, when they start to
Speaker 1: come down, they'll start to fill up full of air.
Speaker 1: So you poke everything and you just make it all
Speaker 1: mince meat in there, and then you stick it in there,
Speaker 1: and you take the suction tube off and you put
Speaker 1: cavity fluid, which is like even more intense from aldehyde,
Speaker 1: and that preserves that in there. And then the autopsy,
Speaker 1: you just take cavity fluid and you open up the
Speaker 1: plastic bag and you just dump it in there.
Speaker 3: Well, So then do you ever like rupture a vein
Speaker 3: when it's being pumped in and end up just in
Speaker 3: the entire.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can do what happens if you're not
Speaker 1: paying attention. Sometimes there's clots that get in there or something.
Speaker 1: You got to watch the pressure. You can just stend.
Speaker 1: You can blow someone's face up really big, or they'll
Speaker 1: start to swell, and then what do you do. So
Speaker 1: you got to really watch that. You got to watch
Speaker 1: and you can see it start to happen, and then
Speaker 1: you stop, okay, and you try to get out there
Speaker 1: and pull the clot out, or you just stop there
Speaker 1: because you don't want to stand a person's face this big.
Speaker 1: Like if you do a cadaverter cadavers are like I
Speaker 1: don't know how many. I think it's like double the
Speaker 1: amount of fluid you would use or tripled the amount
Speaker 1: of fluid you would use on a normal embombing. But
Speaker 1: there's no drainage. You just blow them full up.
Speaker 3: Wait, what's the difference between a cadaver and I mean,
Speaker 3: what distinguishes a cadaver.
Speaker 4: From a research Like for anatomy lab, you're basically like
Speaker 4: mummifying those suckers to keep them for a lot longer,
Speaker 4: like normally, correct me if I'm wrong, Jonathan. Embombing is
Speaker 4: to keep the body looking decent for like an open casket,
Speaker 4: Like it doesn't have to look good for a very
Speaker 4: long a couple of days. But if you're gonna have
Speaker 4: an anatomy class, that's a whole semester that you just
Speaker 4: mummify that sucker a lot of formaldehyde.
Speaker 1: Really intense and formal the hide.
Speaker 4: You're changing the formula. I was at the anatomy lab
Speaker 4: at UCSF.
Speaker 3: And what was that experience, Like, what do you recall
Speaker 3: from that?
Speaker 4: The stench of formaldehyde, I mean really strong and it's
Speaker 4: pretty toxic stuff. So at a certain point in the
Speaker 4: semester they would cut the legs off because they were
Speaker 4: done partly but also to lower the amount of exposure
Speaker 4: from aldehyde, you know, because it's not a pleasant smell.
Speaker 4: But the other thing was what was I found kind
Speaker 4: of fascinating was not something in the lab, but the
Speaker 4: fact that, and this is much more common now than
Speaker 4: it was back then, they were just one of the
Speaker 4: earlier schools that actually did a memorial service for those cadavers.
Speaker 4: Like all the students they got together and the i
Speaker 4: think family members of the cadavers and the students read
Speaker 4: these tributes. And it was kind of moving, you know
Speaker 4: because initially I heard, oh, they're doing a memorial service
Speaker 4: for the cadavers, and I was picturing like what caskets
Speaker 4: with the bodies, and I was kind of like, I
Speaker 4: got to see this, But it was in fact just
Speaker 4: the students and they had They was very touching. They
Speaker 4: were very kind of grateful, and you know, the things
Speaker 4: that they wrote were pretty moving as opposed to back
Speaker 4: in the very early days of teaching anatomy, where you
Speaker 4: were encouraged to make jokes and to like pose the
Speaker 4: box with a cigarette and with your arm around him.
Speaker 4: You know, that was kind of like a way of
Speaker 4: coping back then. Yeah, I mean, humor is a way
Speaker 4: of coping, and that was kind of the standard practice.
Speaker 4: These days, it's there's a much more of an emphasis
Speaker 4: on respecting the gift of the donor, et cetera. And
Speaker 4: they did a good job of doing that. You know,
Speaker 4: the day I was there, people seem very respectful. Who knows,
Speaker 4: you know, when I'm I'm there with a notebook, so
Speaker 4: nobody's going to be, you know, jousting with legs or whatever.
Speaker 3: But you very effectively at the beginning of the book.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you're able to recall any of
Speaker 3: it right now, but you set a tone because you know,
Speaker 3: I realized that, like you, you fuse humor in popular science,
Speaker 3: and that's the tone you use. But I think you
Speaker 3: you really kind of you establish a tone of respect
Speaker 3: at the very beginning of the book.
Speaker 4: Oh that doesn't sound like me.
Speaker 3: Really, it doesn't ring any better. No, here it is.
Speaker 3: This book is not about death as in dying. Death
Speaker 3: as in dying is sad and profound. There's nothing funny
Speaker 3: about losing someone you love or about being the person
Speaker 3: about to be lost. This book is about the already dead,
Speaker 3: the anonymous behind the scenes dead. The cadavers I have
Speaker 3: seen were not depressing or heart wrenching or repulsive. They
Speaker 3: seemed sweet and well intentioned, sometimes sad, occasionally amusing. Some
Speaker 3: were beautiful, some monsters. Some were sweatpants and some were naked,
Speaker 3: some in pieces, others whole. I think that that was
Speaker 3: very artfully done, being able to tie all those things together.
Speaker 4: You know, people would say, oh, you write about death,
Speaker 4: you know, could Sometimes you want like, oh, we're doing
Speaker 4: We're doing some show about death. I'm like, I don't,
Speaker 4: and I don't know anything about death. I didn't write
Speaker 4: about death. That's totally different to me. The world of cadavers,
Speaker 4: that they look like people, but they're not. They're dead.
Speaker 4: They're equally interesting, but just a whole different thing. I
Speaker 4: couldn't really write it about death. Or maybe I could,
Speaker 4: but I don't really want to. But it's a very
Speaker 4: different thing. I mean, the dead and there is humor.
Speaker 4: I mean, I would spent time at the school where
Speaker 4: it's in Michigan, in Detroit. What's the name of the
Speaker 4: university anyway, they do a lot of automotive safety testing.
Speaker 4: They use cadavers to calibrate crash test dummies. They were
Speaker 4: coming up with a new like a side impact dummy,
Speaker 4: and I was there when they were they were doing
Speaker 4: one of the impact tests with the cadaver and they
Speaker 4: had to get this guy as dead guy who had
Speaker 4: a number um O six I think University of Michigan,
Speaker 4: this might have been. Anyway, they had to he had
Speaker 4: to sit in a in a car seat and then
Speaker 4: the impactor would hit him on the shoulder because it
Speaker 4: was you know, they were doing trying to calibrate a
Speaker 4: side impact dummy. So he's sitting and they had him
Speaker 4: you know, he's a dead guy, so he can't sit up,
Speaker 4: and they put him in the car seat and he
Speaker 4: kind of slump, you know, and then they'd like tape
Speaker 4: him up, and then they'd be all set and they'd
Speaker 4: have a lot of you know, the strain gauges were
Speaker 4: all set and they've got the camera set, the video that,
Speaker 4: you know, the to to get the slow motion footage
Speaker 4: and everything's ready to go, and then he'd slump again
Speaker 4: and it was hilarious. I mean it was late at night,
Speaker 4: you know, everybody'd been there a long time. He really
Speaker 4: had comic timing this dead guy, you know, and he's
Speaker 4: wearing like a leotard, which looks bizarre, and it was
Speaker 4: just it was funny, not at his expense. You know,
Speaker 4: it's lovely that he donated his body. It was kind
Speaker 4: of heroic of him. But there is humor in being dead.
Speaker 4: You're like, you're useless, you know, your limbs are flopping
Speaker 4: all over, your bubbles coming out of your ears. I
Speaker 4: don't know. Just why not laugh about it? That's all
Speaker 4: you can do.
Speaker 3: And Jonathan, do you make any in your attraction to
Speaker 3: darkness or the macabre? Do you make that distinction between
Speaker 3: like what we've been talking about with your interest in
Speaker 3: mortuary techniques and science and actual death and the loss
Speaker 3: of life and end of life things like this.
Speaker 1: I guess it's like two different things. It's an art
Speaker 1: to what we did with mortuary science basically artists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but also if you're just an a bomber, which there
Speaker 1: are some just straight and bombers just all they do
Speaker 1: all day. But I worked at the funeral home where
Speaker 1: you were in a bomber and field direct, so you
Speaker 1: had to deal with the family and then you had
Speaker 1: to go and bomb them and then we'll do the
Speaker 1: funeral and everything and doing that all the time. Dealing
Speaker 1: with death is very depressing. It's not fun waking up
Speaker 1: every morning to family after family grieving over someone they lost.
Speaker 1: Because when you're in when you're in the when you're
Speaker 1: in the morgue embombing somebody, you totally respect a body.
Speaker 1: It with someone's mom or dad, but you don't know
Speaker 1: their story, you don't see their family, you don't see
Speaker 1: any of that stuff. So you're like, Okay, just look
Speaker 1: at this older person at a great life for it's a
Speaker 1: young kid. Oh, this is a this is horrible that
Speaker 1: this happened. And I go about my business and bomba
Speaker 1: do my job. But when I see the family, like,
Speaker 1: say the kid it's in there, I say, their parents distraught, crime,
Speaker 1: they just lost their son, their grandparents, all their friends
Speaker 1: just crying and grieving on this person. It wears on you. Man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's got to be the hardest part, for sure.
Speaker 1: That's a totally different thing. Yeah, But I mean I
Speaker 1: wanted to be an embomber, but the funeral home I
Speaker 1: worked at, I had to be everything. I was the apprentice.
Speaker 1: So I'm out there mowing the lawn, digging ditches for sprinklers.
Speaker 1: Oh go and bomb this person, go do this. I
Speaker 1: was doing everything, so I saw everything. What I really
Speaker 1: wanted to do is just be left alone and let
Speaker 1: me do my gig in the back of the Morgan.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to see no one or do anything.
Speaker 1: That would have been perfect.
Speaker 4: But did you have to deal with the families, like
Speaker 4: did you have to do the whole conversation about them?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I would sit in they were teaching me that
Speaker 1: to be a funeral director, and how they you know,
Speaker 1: the whole thing is how their wishes, how which which
Speaker 1: cassket there they're going to pick, and how they wanted
Speaker 1: to do. What the religion was, either a priest or
Speaker 1: a pastor. I mean, there's so many different things.
Speaker 4: Did you do preparation? Did I do what you know,
Speaker 4: like preparation, like you know, sewing the mouth shut and
Speaker 4: putting the you know, eye things in the eye and
Speaker 4: all that to make them.
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh everything I caps, Yeah, yeah, I caps the
Speaker 1: eye caps. And if you were you either use the
Speaker 1: staple gun where they wire the josh shut. I was
Speaker 1: an old school guy. I would just susure it and
Speaker 1: that's just going up through the lip.
Speaker 4: That's what I saw. The suturing.
Speaker 1: Yet you're just suturing. You tie it up like that
Speaker 1: and then you just use icaps.
Speaker 4: I have an eye cap.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I got a couple of those. I even
Speaker 1: actually have some screwing, like for troke cars, right, you
Speaker 1: get a Troe car button, that's where they would steal that.
Speaker 1: But I have a rectl one. Oh my god that
Speaker 1: I wish they had those because I had to manually
Speaker 1: sew up a couple buttles in my day.
Speaker 3: Well you talk about that in your book, Mary, because
Speaker 3: there's leakage.
Speaker 1: That's right, because there's leakage today.
Speaker 4: I was there, they were doing the demonstration and they're like, well,
Speaker 4: for this guy, we probably don't need to suture the anus,
Speaker 4: and they go they look at me like unless the visitor,
Speaker 4: the visitor would like to see it. I'm like, I'm good. No,
Speaker 4: you don't want a leacoln in the casket.
Speaker 1: No you don't. But I used to use this restorative
Speaker 1: clay or they call it tamponing, and you use four
Speaker 1: steps and cotton and then you seal it up with
Speaker 1: this club. But yeah, it was kind of like an
Speaker 1: old school. Now it's this plastic troke card.
Speaker 3: Plastic we what's it called? Plastic wet.
Speaker 1: These are little trill card was worth, these little buttons,
Speaker 1: and that you'd screw them into where the hole was
Speaker 1: where you stuck the troke car in and it would
Speaker 1: seal it up so nothing would leaked.
Speaker 3: But they made them for anuses in what nineteenth century?
Speaker 1: No, I mean it's now they're new work and they
Speaker 1: didn't have them. Yeah, they didn't have them at all.
Speaker 1: Now you just screw that thing in and it's like Scott,
Speaker 1: it's threaded and it just threads like a screw and
Speaker 1: it's totally sealed. I wish I had that back then.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: And if we use vaginally anal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they didn't have that. The day I was there,
Speaker 4: they were talking about just needle and thread like they
Speaker 4: did with the mouth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd sew the things up. But things I wish
Speaker 1: I had back then. But things worked out different. Glady
Speaker 1: a rockstar. I didn't have to do that, did they.
Speaker 3: Did they have a crematorium at the funeral home you
Speaker 3: worked at, Jonathan.
Speaker 1: No, but I'd have to take bodies all the time
Speaker 1: to the crematorium. It was another mortuary, okay who had
Speaker 1: a crematorium. So they'd be put in a plastic we'd
Speaker 1: make these plastic like coffins, not plastic, I'm sorry, cardboard, yep.
Speaker 1: And place them there and then put them in the
Speaker 1: hearts and take them to the crematory and we pay
Speaker 1: them for their service. And then I'd pick them up
Speaker 1: in a plastic box, take them back to the mortuary
Speaker 1: and then they'd be transferred into their urn that they bought.
Speaker 3: Okay, well that also Mary goes into the process in
Speaker 3: the book about cremation, which was pretty wild, and it
Speaker 3: includes that bodies sometimes sit up. Do you remember that?
Speaker 1: Oh, they sit up. It's like a straw. If you
Speaker 1: put a flame to a straw, you're gonna see it
Speaker 1: do all this weird creakily the it's the heat. They'll
Speaker 1: pop right out of the box, sit up, and used
Speaker 1: to see them start breaking off.
Speaker 3: It's weird because you could look into the oven while
Speaker 3: it was happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can see there's a little hole. If you
Speaker 1: open it up, you can see it.
Speaker 4: They have to have the viewing window for is it
Speaker 4: Hindu fan or there's some religion where you have to
Speaker 4: observe the body as it's being cremated.
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, I know that.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: I forget which speaking of Eastern religions. Mary, you bring
Speaker 3: up something in the decomposition. It was the Nine Cemetery contemplations,
Speaker 3: the Buddhist cutra on mindfulness.
Speaker 4: Do you recall, Well, I do remember bringing that up,
Speaker 4: and I don't remember the words to it, but it
Speaker 4: was a it's a meditation. You're supposed to meditate on
Speaker 4: the Charnel house or something. We're supposed to go to it.
Speaker 4: I forget where you're supposed to go. But you're supposed
Speaker 4: to meditate on the decomposing body, the process of death.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: It's a Buddhist kind of way of teaching oneself that
Speaker 4: the body is not what matters, and you know the
Speaker 4: impermanence of the body, and anyway, I don't know, I
Speaker 4: don't have.
Speaker 3: I do you say? Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate
Speaker 3: on a series of decomposing bodies in the Charnel ground,
Speaker 3: starting with a body quote swollen and blue and festering,
Speaker 3: progressing to one quote being eaten by different kinds of worms,
Speaker 3: then moving on to a skeleton without flesh and blood,
Speaker 3: held together by tendons. The monks were told to keep
Speaker 3: meditating until they were calm and a smile appeared on
Speaker 3: their faces.
Speaker 4: Oh it sounds like the body Farm.
Speaker 1: Body Farm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. So we've just got a few more
Speaker 3: minutes here. Is there anything else that we should cover?
Speaker 3: I mean, this has been the most unique recording that
Speaker 3: I've ever done in the dozens that I've done on
Speaker 3: the shore.
Speaker 4: I can't believe it's almost over.
Speaker 3: The one thing that when I mentioned at the very beginning,
Speaker 3: the thing that always sticks with me that I remembered
Speaker 3: from when I first opened this book on Christmas morning,
Speaker 3: was you talk about some of the earlier recorded research
Speaker 3: on dead bodies, and it was in the French Revolution,
Speaker 3: those that were beheaded in the gilt latine, and that
Speaker 3: there's some guy that was like running the heads down
Speaker 3: to his lab to see if he could Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was no one's just guy there, Paris. His
Speaker 1: name is because the guy.
Speaker 4: So the there's also Jean Baptiste Vincent Labon.
Speaker 1: And so I've held one. There's a whole museum in France,
Speaker 1: and nobody knows how he preserved them, but he would
Speaker 1: diicycle right down the middle and they're perfectly preserved. They're
Speaker 1: like mummified and you can just see and hold one
Speaker 1: and see just a perfect, you know, side of view
Speaker 1: of the.
Speaker 3: Heads, like the bodies exhibit.
Speaker 1: Like the body exhibited by gun thro von Hagen, I
Speaker 1: think his name. I think Fred was doing this fascination,
Speaker 1: that's what it's called. Wow, he was doing this way
Speaker 1: back before all that, during the Guilletine time. So, like
Speaker 1: I said, I love medical preparations. I collect him. I
Speaker 1: love just like the the Uh. There's a place in Philly.
Speaker 4: Oh, my Lutar Museum.
Speaker 1: Ammut Museum is one of my favorite places.
Speaker 4: I know the curator and the director, so anytime you
Speaker 4: want to behind the city, they got some good stuff
Speaker 4: behind the scenes. I knew that lady Gretchen Warden. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Gretchen worms she died around two thousand and four. Yeah,
Speaker 4: she would bring preparations on the Johnny Carson Show.
Speaker 1: Would let me go in there. I don't know the
Speaker 1: new people yet, so I got to meet the new
Speaker 1: people because I love that place.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well we should go together sometimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be amazing.
Speaker 4: Anna Dotie is the woman who's running it now, who's
Speaker 4: got a real taste for the macrob.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's the thing that's got like the distended colon
Speaker 3: wrapping around several mega.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's in this beautiful case, you know, and it's
Speaker 4: very quiet and there because if you go on a weekday,
Speaker 4: there's nobody in there and you just sort of it's
Speaker 4: kind of meditative. There's the colon and it's as big
Speaker 4: around as I am. That is a big ass colon.
Speaker 1: It's huge. And they got twins. Yeah, yeah, Chang and
Speaker 1: Eng changing their bodies and then they'll be.
Speaker 4: Like just the weirdest, Like this is a jar of
Speaker 4: skin that this woman would pick off her body and
Speaker 4: she sent it to them. I thought you might want this,
Speaker 4: that would people like send them. There's a necklace made
Speaker 4: of hemorrhoids that might be not on display, that might
Speaker 4: be in the back, but I mean it's just you gotta.
Speaker 1: Go on the back. There's some crazy you.
Speaker 3: Gotta go on the back. You know. This makes me
Speaker 3: think of an out of print book about the investigation
Speaker 3: into Elvis's death, and there's seriously detailed descriptions about the
Speaker 3: autopsy and specifically is Colin and which you know had
Speaker 3: a lot of pharmaceutic you know.
Speaker 4: I had a chapter on that.
Speaker 3: On Elvis's body, I interviewed his doctor.
Speaker 4: I have a chapter on mega cool and an extreme constipation,
Speaker 4: and I went to see Needles Nick before he.
Speaker 3: Died Doctor Nicopolis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I hung out with doctor Nick. I tried
Speaker 4: on the Hamburger ring that Elvis had made for Missus Nicopolis,
Speaker 4: which has diamonds in all the colors of like a
Speaker 4: hamber her and the bond and the pickles. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I know, I had chapter on the megical Elvis had
Speaker 4: mega hirschsprungs. He had hirsprungs.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it was like something like six feet of
Speaker 3: undigested pills or something like that.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 4: It was rock hard. And when Nick told me this,
Speaker 4: he like knocked on the stone of the fireplace, goes
Speaker 4: it was rock hard like this.
Speaker 3: Nick was allowed at the autopsy.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't know if Nick was at the autopsy
Speaker 4: or he heard about it. I don't he probably, I
Speaker 4: don't know, but probably he was his doctors his personal doctor,
Speaker 4: so probably he was there. Well, that's crazy, Sorry I
Speaker 4: was I interrupted you.
Speaker 1: No, that's cool.
Speaker 3: I talked talk about doctor Nick all day. Well that
Speaker 3: that was an interesting book and it goes all into
Speaker 3: the investigation in the autopsy.
Speaker 4: I've read that. I've read that book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think Heraldo Rivera is involved for some reason. Anyway,
Speaker 3: this has been so incredible. I really appreciate this.
Speaker 1: This is awesome. I love you know what I have
Speaker 1: to go through. This was really cool.
Speaker 4: This was a bit. It was great to meet you, John, very.
Speaker 1: Nice to meet you. Mary hopefully would crosspaths sometime.
Speaker 3: Check out Korn's line of freakon Aleish pet accessories at
Speaker 3: freakondleish dot com and they're here to slay hot sauce
Speaker 3: at Heatoness dot com. A new edition of Mary's book
Speaker 3: Stiff was just released, as was the paperback version of
Speaker 3: her book Fuzz. For excerpts and more information, please visit
Speaker 3: Maryroach dot net. Sing for Science is co produced by
Speaker 3: Talkhouse and made possible in part by a grant from
Speaker 3: Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Our music
Speaker 3: is by Panoram. Social media manager is Bailey Constance and
Speaker 3: digital producer is Keenan Cush. If you liked today's episode,
Speaker 3: please tell a friend about the show and give us
Speaker 3: a review in some Stars. For more information, go to
Speaker 3: Sing for Science dot org and follow us on social
Speaker 3: media at sing for Science. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: I f