Chapter 12, Remains of the Author Summary and Analysis

Thinking of her own eventual demise, Roach considers the attitude of UCSF anatomy professor Hugh Patterson, who feels that in death he will continue to teach the subject that he loved in life. Roach ponders the idea of becoming an educational skeleton, but concedes that 80 percent of bodies left to science wind up as anatomy lab dissections. A skeleton, to Roach's mind, is at least aesthetically pleasing.

The author calls the University of New Mexico Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, which is one of the few locations that accepts donated bodies for skeleton harvesting. She is given her choice of watching either a "cut down" or a "pour off." The first involves a cutting away of the flesh and the second involves a dissolving of residual flesh by way of boiling. Since Roach does...