To ensure it offers a realistic human stand-in, measurements are taken from that old analog stand-by - cadavers. At her best, she travels a low road of morbid curiosity to arrive at something deeply human (everyone poops) and oddly elevating (her breakout 2003 hit “Stiff,” about cadavers, has much charm - a not-inconsiderable feat).Ī onetime travel writer, Roach excels in capturing science’s “foreign country” aspect - roaming as a stranger in a strange land among its weird norms and novelties, grand monomaniacal passions, practitioners’ idiosyncrasies and obscure lexicon.Īt Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a “bio-engineered” crash-test dummy is under development for use in simulated rocket attacks to better understand the forces acting upon soldiers inside military vehicles under assault and to develop new safety features. “Grunt” is her seventh book, including “Bonk,” “Spook” and “Gulp” (examining, respectively, sex, science’s take on the afterlife, and the digestive tract and its outputs). Roach takes their writhing to be playful exuberance before Peck notes, “They do cannibalize.” Medical maggots were FDA approved in 2007 (in case you’re wondering, they’re contained in a “cage dressing”), but there’s a reminder of “nature, red in tooth and claw” when entomologist George Peck coaxes three onto Roach’s index finger. Later, she recounts the pestilential effects on troops through history of the filth fly but its redeeming quality, in larval maggot form, as a wound cleaner - devouring decaying flesh like a minesweeper clearing a minefield. In a “windowless horror movie of a room,” Roach observes a procedure performed on two cadavers with “the potential to restore the wholeness of a young man.”
“Phalloplasty” has come a long way and surgeons have developed a passable “neopenis” fashioned from “inflatable rods,” but they are prone to rupture, hence the interest in penis transplant.
She’s unflinchingly ready to explicitly describe things we’re inclined to be squeamish about, and in her latest book, “Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War” - no less drenched in sordid secretions - it doesn’t take long for the going to get gory.Īt Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and nearby Johns Hopkins University, she reports from the front line of genital reconstruction surgery for injured soldiers. Mary Roach’s books come marinated in bodily fluids and infused with noxious vapors you feel like you should be wearing rubber gloves to turn the pages.
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