Stiff (13 page)

On the other side of the gender gap, a Pub Med search on "clitoris" and

"cadaver" turned up but a single entry. Australian urologist Helen O'Connell, author of "Anatomical Relationship Between Urethra and Clitoris" (ten cadaver perinea), bristles at the disparity: "Modern anatomy texts," she writes, "have reduced descriptions of female perineal anatomy to a brief adjunct after a complete description of the male anatomy." I picture O'Connell as a sort of Gloria Steinem of the research set, the fast-moving, can-do feminist in a lab coat. She is also the first researcher I've come across in my haphazard wanderings to have worked with infant cadavers. (She did this because the comparable male erectile tissue research had, for reasons not explained, been done on infants.) Her paper states that she obtained ethical approval from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology and the Board of Medical Research of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which clearly don't go about their business with the grim specter of media evisceration foremost in their minds.

Footnotes:

[
1]
Other lively things to do with X-ray video cameras: At Cornell University, biomechanics researcher Diane Kelley has filmed lab rats mating in X-ray, in order to shed light on the possible role of the penis bone. Humans do not have penis bones, nor have they, to the author's knowledge, been captured having sex on X-ray videotape. They have, however, been filmed having sex inside an MRI tube, by fun-loving physiologists at the University Hospital in Groningen, Netherlands. The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis "has the shape of a boomerang."

[
2]
From a safety standpoint, it would have been better to skip steering wheels entirely and install a pair of rudderlike handles on either side of the driver's seat, as was done in the "Survival Car," a traveling demo car built by the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in the early 1960s to show the world how to build cars that save lives (and reduce insurance company payouts). Other visionary design elements included a rear-facing front passenger seat, a feature about as likely to sell cars as, well, steering rudders. Safety did not sell automobiles in the sixties, style did, and the Survival Car failed to change the world.

[
3]
This is why you shouldn't worry all that much about sitting in the middle seat, without a shoulder belt. If the car gets hit from the side, you're better off being farther from the doors. The kindly people beside you, the ones with the shoulder belts, will absorb the impact for you.

[
4]
To quote a Stapp Car Crash Conference study on the topic,

"Pedestrians are not 'run over' by cars. They are 'run under.' " It typically goes like this: Bumper hits calf and front of hood hits hip, knocking the legs out from under and flipping them up over the head. The cartwheeling pedestrian then lands on his head or chest on the hood or windshield. Depending on the speed of the impact, he may continue cartwheeling, legs over head again, and land flat on the roof, and from there slide off onto the pavement. Or he may remain on the hood, with his head smashed through the windshield. Whereupon the driver calls an ambulance, unless the driver is someone like Fort Worth nurse's aide Chante Mallard, in which case she keeps on driving, returns to her house, and allegedly leaves the car in the garage with the victim sticking out of her windshield until he bleeds to death. This event took place in October 2001. Mallard was arrested and charged with murder.

[
5]
As fans of the eating sections of old Guinness books of world records will surmise, this figure has been surpassed on numerous occasions.

Some stomachs, by way of heredity or prolonged daily gourmandism, are roomier than average. Orson Welles's was one such stomach. According to the owners of Pink's hot dog stand in L.A., the voluminous director once sat down and finished off eighteen franks.

The all-time record holder would appear to be a twenty-three-year-old London fashion model whose case was described in the April 1985
Lancet
.

At what turned out to be her last meal, the young woman managed to put away nineteen pounds of food: one pound of liver, two pounds of kidney, a half pound of steak, one pound of cheese, two eggs, two thick slices of bread, one cauliflower, ten peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, two pounds each of plums, carrots, and grapes, and two glasses of milk. Whereupon her stomach blew and she died. (The human gastrointestinal tract is home to trillions of bacteria, which, should they escape the confines of their stinky, labyrinthine home, create a massive and often fatal systemic infection.)

Runner-up goes to a thirty-one-year-old Florida psychologist who was found collapsed in her kitchen. The Dade County medical examiner's report itemized the fatal last meal: "8700 cc of poorly masticated, undigested hot dogs, broccoli and cereal suspended in a green liquid that contained numerous small bubbles." The green liquid remains a mystery, as does the apparent widespread appeal of hot dogs among modern-day gorgers (from Salon.com).

[
6]
This was a subject of heated debate in ophthalmology corners. Some felt that if you made baseballs softer, they would deform on impact and penetrate more deeply into the socket, causing more damage, not less. A study done by researchers at the Vision Performance and Safety Service at Tufts University School of Medicine showed that softer balls did indeed penetrate more deeply, but they didn't cause more damage. That would have been tough to do, for the harder balls ruptured the eye "from the limbus to the optic nerve with almost total extrusion of the intraocular contents." Let us hope that the manufacturers of amateur sports equipment have read the March 1999
Archives of Ophthalmology

and adjusted the hardness of their baseballs accordingly. Either way, eye protection for Little Leaguers is a swell idea.

[
7]
This was a joint effort involving the living and the dead, with the dead getting the shorter end of the stick: Following dissections of the dead penises, "10 healthy males" agreed to help confirm the findings by undergoing electrical stimulation of the dorsal nerve, as healthy males are wont to agree to.

5

Beyond the Black Box

When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash
Dennis Shanahan works in a roomy suite on the second floor of the house he shares with his wife, Maureen, in a subdivision ten minutes east of downtown Carlsbad, California. The office is quiet and sunny and offers no hint of the grisly nature of the work done within. Shanahan is an injury analyst. Much of the time, he analyzes the wounds and breakages of the living. He consults for car companies being sued by people making dubious claims ("the seat belt broke." "I wasn't driving," and so on) that are easily debunked by looking at their injuries. Every now and then the bodies he studies are dead ones. Such was the case with TWA Flight 800.

Bound for Paris from JFK International Airport on July 17, 1996, Flight 800 blew apart in the air over the Atlantic off East Moriches, New York.

Witness reports were contradictory. Some claimed to have seen a missile strike the aircraft. Traces of explosives had turned up in the recovered wreckage, but no trace of bomb hardware had been found. (Later it would come out that the explosive materials had been planted in the plane long before the crash, as part of a sniffer-dog training exercise.) Conspiracy theories sprouted and spread. The investigation dragged on without a definitive answer to the question on everyone's mind: What—

or who—had brought Flight 800 down from the sky?

Within days of the crash, Shanahan flew to New York to visit the bodies of the dead and see what they had to say. Last spring, I flew to Carlsbad, California, to visit Shanahan. I wanted to know how—scientifically and emotionally—a person does this job.

I had other questions for him too. Shanahan is a man who knows the reality behind the nightmare. He knows, in grim medical detail, exactly what happens to people in different types of crashes. He knows how they typically die, whether they're likely to have been cognizant of what was happening, and how—in a low-altitude crash, anyway—they might have increased their chances of survival. I told him I would only take up an hour of his time, but stayed for five.

A crashed plane will usually tell its own story. Sometimes literally, in the voices on the cockpit flight recorder; sometimes by implication, in the rendings and charrings of the fallen craft. But when a plane goes down over the ocean, its story may be patchy and incoherent. If the water is especially deep or the currents swift and chaotic, the black box may not be recovered, nor may enough of the sunken wreckage be recovered to determine for sure what occurred in the plane's last minutes. When this happens, investigators turn to what is known in aviation pathology textbooks as "the human wreckage": the bodies of passengers. For unlike a wing or a piece of fuselage, a corpse will float to the water's surface. By studying victims' wounds—the type, the severity, which side of the body they're on—an injury analyst can begin to piece together the horrible unfolding of events.

Shanahan is waiting for me when I arrive at the airport. He is wearing Dockers, a short-sleeved shirt, and aviator-frame glasses. His hair lies neatly on either side of a perfectly straight part. It could almost be a toupee, but isn't. He is polite, composed, and immediately likable. He reminds me of my pharmacist Mike.

He isn't at all what I'd had in mind. I had imagined someone gruff, morgue-hardened, prone to expletives. I had planned to do my interview in the field, in the aftermath of a crash. I pictured the two of us in a makeshift morgue in some small-town dance hall or high-school gym, he in his stained lab coat, me with my notepad. This was before I realized that Shanahan himself does not do the autopsies for the crashes he investigates. These are done by teams of medical examiners from nearby county morgues. Though he goes to the site and will often examine bodies for one reason or another, Shanahan works mostly with the autopsy reports, correlating these with the flight's seating chart to identify clusters of telltale injuries. He explained that visiting him at work on a crash site might have required a wait of several years, for the cause of most crashes isn't a mystery, and thus input from the cadavers isn't often called for.

When I tell him I was disappointed over not being able to report from the scene of a crash, Shanahan hands me a book called
Aerospace Pathology
, which, he assures me, contains photographs of the sorts of things I might have seen. I open the volume to a section on "body plotting." Among line sketches of downed plane pieces, small black dots are scattered. Leader lines spoke away from the dots to their labels: "brown leather shoes,"

"copilot," "piece of spine," "stewardess." By the time I get to the chapter that describes Shanahan's work—"Patterns of Injury in Fatal Aircraft Accidents," wherein photo captions remind investigators to keep in mind things like "intense heat may produce intracranial steam resulting in blowout of the cranial vault, simulating injuries from impact"—it has become clear to me that labeled black dots are as up-close-and-personal as I wish to get to the human wreckage of a plane crash.

In the case of TWA Flight 800, Shanahan was on the trail of a bomb. He was analyzing the victims' injuries for evidence of an explosion in the cabin. If he found it, he would then try to pinpoint where on the plane the bomb had been. He takes a thick folder from a file cabinet drawer and pulls out his team's report. Here is the chaos and gore of a major passenger airline crash quantified and outlined, with figures and charts and bar graphs, transformed from horror into something that can be discussed over coffee in a National Transportation Safety Board morning meeting. "4.19: Injury Predominance Right vs. Left with Floating Victims,

" "4.28: Mid-Shaft Femur Fractures and Forward Horizontal Seat Frame Damage." I ask Shanahan whether the statistics and the dispassionate prose helped him maintain what I imagine to be a necessary emotional remove from the human tragedy behind the inquiry. He looks down at his hands, which rest, fingers interlinked, on the Flight 800 folder.

"Maureen will tell you I coped variably with Flight 800. It was emotionally very traumatic, particularly with the number of teenagers on board. A high school French club going to Paris. Young couples. We were all pretty grim." Shanahan says this isn't typical of the mood behind the scenes at a crash site. "You want a very superficial involvement, so jokes and lightheartedness tend to be fairly common. Not this time."

For Shanahan, the hardest thing about Flight 800 was that most of the bodies were relatively whole. "Intactness bothers me much more than the lack of it," he says. The sorts of things most of us can't imagine seeing or coping with—severed hands, legs, scraps of flesh—Shanahan is more comfortable with. "That way, it's just tissue. You can put yourself in that frame of mind and get on with your job." It's gory, but not sad. Gore you get used to. Shattered lives you don't. Shanahan does what the pathologists do. "They focus on the parts, not the person. During the autopsy, they'll be describing the eyes, then the mouth. You don't stand back and say, 'This is a person who is the father of four.' It's the only way you can emotionally survive."