Mary Roach's nonfiction text Stiff:The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,demonstrates the several ways that dead bodies are still useful and are not indeed worthless or too sacred as once thought.The author first sustains her original argument by talking about how useful a human head is after death and the enormous work that can be done with it and the brain that would actually help the living so much more than we realize;she then briefly speaks of ancient ways in which people would use dead bodies by explicitly stating that there were cannibalistic rituals performed with the bodies of the dead and were commonly thought to be beneficial to a living being's health ;and to conclude she conveys that a number of people within the medical/scientific community,with the information they hold,are ready and willing to surrender their body to science by displaying a cheeky sense of humor about it and accepting this fate as reasonable but is unsure if she herself could ever truly commit to it.Her purpose is to in order to help people see that we really do need people to surrender their bodies to science,otherwise bodies will be disturbed in a very vile way.She seems to have a very wide and general audience in mind because she deals with issues that hit a little too close to home and help you think about what you will do with your own body after death.

Application Question:How does the way bodies have been treated throughout the ages relate to the sophistication/advancement of present day society?