Popular 2003 Stiff By Mary Roach Sparknotes

Every 10 minutes, a new person is added to the organ transplant list (organdonor.gov). That’s 144 people each and every day. With the help of human cadavers, those 144 people can be helped and be given the opportunity to a more prolonged life. Mary Roach uses her book to inform people of this and uses different rhetorical devices to convince people to join in on the donation. Mary Roach has always had an interest in science related topics, whether she is experiencing it first hand or is writing about it. She’s had jobs that span from working in a zoo to being a journalist, but now she is an author who specializes in science and humor, which is very evident in her popular 2003 Stiff. Her motivation for said book, was to show her audience that

The first section uses imagery and metaphors to paint the picture of what is going on in the operation room and what the surgeon thinks about performing on a cadaver. She describes the operation process, “The harvesting of H is winding down. The last organs to be taken, the kidneys, are being brought up and separated from the depths of her open torso.” The way the surgery is being described makes it easy for the reader to feel like they are right there witnessing the event with Mary Roach. Although it is a heavy subject, Mary Roach lightens the mood by including a metaphor in the passage. She compares the red, bloody ice to a “Cherry Sno-Kone”, which provides some comedy for the reader so they aren’t too engrossed in the gory thought of the situation. She adds in even more humor when she describes the veins and arteries, “like spare sweater buttons”, because they can be sewn back together, like a button can be on clothing. Mary Roach’s use of imagery and humor helps the reader picture the organ donation process while still keeping the passage not too

The last two paragraphs of the passage focus on the use of pathos. Roach says “To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don’t manage this sort of thing while they’re alive”. When people read this, it makes them want to be able to take part in something so spectacular. She then goes on to appeal to logic, “It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot”. The statistics really make people think. What’s the point in wasting organs that could help another human being stay alive? “We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own live, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life”. If we want to be able to help our own loved ones, we should also want to help someone else’s loved