STIFF Chapters 7 & 8: Summary

In 1931, Father Armaihac held an annual gathering in France, called the Laennec Conference, in which French doctors and medical students attended. He carried with him documents and photos pertaining to the Shroud of Turin, the cloth which is believed to be wrapped around Jesus when he was taken down from the cross after crucifixion. Father Armaihac’s goal of this particular conference was to present the Shroud to France’s finest anatomists to see if the markings on the Shroud correctly responded to the realities of anatomy and physiology, to see if the story fit. A doctor by the name of Pierre Barbet nominated himself to be the one to test this. He ended up being extremely devoted to this project. To test his theories, he used a human cadaver and a homemade cross, similar to the one in Jesus’ story, and crucified the cadaver. He looked at blood flow stains on the Shroud that were said to be made when Jesus tried to keep himself from falling down while on the cross. He tested his ideas with by crucifying and entire human cadaver once, then he just used a cadaver arm to test this idea a series of twelve more times. He found that the angles the arms made on the cross corresponded to the blood stains on the Shroud.
Frederick Zugibe, a medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, spent his time researching crucifixion and disagreeing ideas made by Dr. Pierre Barbet regarding the Shroud. Instead of using human cadavers to test his theories, Zugibe used live volunteers. He strapped them onto homemade crosses in his garage and after several runs of the experiment, he found that the blood stains made on the Shroud were not a result of blood falling out of the wrists due to certain angles of the arm. He determined that the blood stain patterns were simply made as a result of the Shroud being washed after Jesus was taken down from the cross.
Not only are human cadavers used for experiments, many times they are used for organ and tissue donations. Cadaver “H” is considered to be a “beating heart cadaver”. This means she is a fully functioning human body everywhere but in her brain. She is hooked up to a respirator to keep her organs thriving, but is considered brain-dead and is therefore considered legally dead. Cadaver “H” is partaking in an organ recovery procedure where her heart, both of her kidneys, and her liver will be surgically taken out and transplanted to living human beings in need of them. Throughout history, many theories have been questioned pertaining to where in the human body does the soul live and does it actually leave the body when one dies. In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall ran a series of experiments seeking to determine whether the soul could be physically weighed. He would put people that were hours away from death onto gurneys, which he would then place on a large scale. He then waited and watched for the person to die and the second they were pronounced dead, he would determine if there was any weight loss. He found a very minuscule amount of weight loss, but it was unknown whether it was due to evaporation of bodily fluids or due to the loss of the human soul.
Throughout history, the soul has been given numerous different places of residence. The earliest being behind the eyebrows, behind the Pineal Gland, then contained completely in the blood. It wasn’t until the twentieth century when Thomas Edison announced that he believed living beings were controlled by “life unit”, smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell, and upon death, evacuated the human body.
It is difficult to find the exact location of the human soul, since it is not a physical entity. No one has really given an exact location, we just know that humans have souls and they reside somewhere within all of us.