Severe constipation and sudden death. Host how did you find out . Guest at found that out one fine day when i was talking to somebody at the armed forces institute, and it suggests some difficulties, internal difficulties, the woman happened to say to me, personally died of that, i went what, and i spent a day with doctors and learned about the kings troubles with severe constipation. Host who was his doctor . Host dr. Nick nickowpollis. It was lovely, it was the anniversary of elviss death, and hardcore fans who come to graceland and memphis who were milling around. Dr. Nicholas doing a memorial tribute went over to his house, the house and all this bill from webmac when in the 70s, and great big rooms. He and his wife had not, furniture was quite far apart and i would try to lean down, try to get slightly to get the coffee cup down and we talked about elvis and every now and then, would pop up with an observation or comment about Priscilla Presley rescinding, a dispatch from the nation of etna. What you learn from dr. Nick . I was there i should explain gulp adventures on the alimentary canal, the subtitle is gulp adventures on the alimentary canal so it is everything from that detail. Is a to do with constipation, is it possible to die of constipation, a year sometimes about people who died upon the toilet, would be appropriate with elvis but i was interested in this notion because most people assume it was drugs, an overdose that killed elvis, and the actual moment of death as far as i could tell from the autopsy, the cause of death was the fatal heart arrhythmia which can come on when someone is straining at school so the moment of death would appear to have been dedication associated so i thought i need to talk to dr. Nick, a lovely gracious man is thes and invited me in and we sat around and had coffee and chatted about elvis and constipation and things. Host where did you get the idea to write gulp adventures on the alimentary canal . Guest gulp adventures on the alimentary canal is still mary roachable. A wonder right didnt write about this topic before. It is a taboo subject. I enjoy writing about taboo topics, particularly that relate to the human body partly because it is fun to play with taboo because everybody stays away from it, therefore all the more for me to play with. I am the bottom feeder of nonfiction. I will take that, you dont want to do it i will do it. I think people, anything that is taken away and made taboo people are secretly fascinated with kind of like somebody says you are on a diet that you cant have any desert or something so that is what you crave, people are both repulsed and drawn to it and want a peak bob heintz the curtain so i am pulling the curtain apart for people and also when it is your body you are talking about the taboo does as a disservice, sometimes people have health concerns, people talk to the doctor, Elvis Presleys problems, those are things that because it is taboo people dont want to bring it up, they feel embarrassed, constipation is an embarrassing thing to talk about. Host you right there is an undeniable feeling i have had ten times in my life, a mix of wonder, privilege, humidity and on that borders on fear. With the Northern Lights whipping over had seemingly close dropped to my knees. And look at of sparkling smear of the galaxy. What experience where you having when you wrote this . What made you have that feeling . I decided to get my first colonoscopy without any drugs because i wanted to see what it looked like in there. My feeling was this is your own body and this opportunity, very rare opportunity to see these miraculous parts of you that our day in and day out doing these Amazing Things and i thought okay, i am going to observe this, i am going to see my own and i expected to feel the emotions i am describing in the passage that you just read when in fact i felt mild to moderate cramping. That had been my hope, that it would be a transcendent experience and it was actually an amazing thing to witness. The intermittent sharp pain and discomfort kind of distracted me from my goal of what the feelings. Host mary roach, theres the National Museum of health and medicine in washington. That is the home of the mega that inspired the trip to memphis to visit with dr. Nick, elviss personal physician for many years. That is what brought on this whole chapter. Host what is bonk mean . Guest as saying for sexual intercourse. People start calling, excuse me, i believe you misspell the title of your own book, it is boring, not bond. Is both a. Blanc is more common in the u. K. That is what people say in the u. K. But i grew up in new england, to me boink is a silly word. That is why i chose bonk but it is the people right to me and said aps, i think it is boink and it got past the copy editor and no one noticed the title was misspelled but enough people complain that i have made up for book tours a middle yellow letters i, a bowl oflittle yell letters i, a bowl of people to apply to this it really bothers them the used bonk instead boink. Thune host what did you research . Guest this is a book about people, brave souls who study the physiology of sex meaning not gender stuff or sociology or hiv transmission, but just the buyer mechanics and physiology of arousal, orgasm, intercourse of people say this is a system, a human sins demanded deserves like any other human system to be studied and understood and for centuries nobody did that and it wasnt until masters and johnson got it rolling in earnest, the 40s and 50s nobody wanted to go there so i looked at people who went there, brave souls who went there. Host how significant rhythm masters and johnson and kinsey study . Guest kinseys contributions had more to do with extensive interviewing, and people do this long, not unlike this three our interview, this extensive interview about sexual habits, what do you do and who do you do it with and how many times and in what position, very specific personal questions about peoples sexual out and publish these two volumes and it was controversial, the things he uncovered so that is what he did but he did get interested, in the 40s and 50s and he did at one point bring people into the attic of his house in indiana and the addict sessions were essentially him with the movie camera and notepad observing taking notes, answering certain questions and studying the process, the sexual response cycle as it would come to be called but it was never published in any journal or anywhere else. He didnt have an institute, wasnt wearing the white coat, fast forward to masters and johnson, masters and johnson, this was in the 50s, brought volunteers in to be observed and sometimes it was couples, sometimes it was one person, they were just documenting the entire sexual response cycle in men and women like the beginning stages of arousal, orgasm, and really specific to publish this book human sexual response came out in the 50s or maybe it is in the book, but at a time when it was really scandalous, and they had gone out of their way to address it up in traffics of formal science and they came up with euphemisms with a lot of syllables, the couple having sex in the lab would be the reacting unit. Of the man lost his erection it would be of failure of directive performance. Pornography would be stimulus of literature. Everything had a multisyllabic euphemism. Even then, the book is absolutely not titillating. Theres nothing in it. It is the big book and very thorough. Nevertheless even though theres nothing scandalous, they had so much hate mail they had to hire a second secretary to handle all of the hate mail. My hat is off to them. It was a tremendously brave thing to do at the time. Very conservative era. Nothing like this had never been done and they did it and got people to come into the lab. That was an amazing thing. I would have loved to interview some of their subjects, but they were anonymous. Masters and johnson were fiercely protective of their identities. I was going to put an ad in the paper saying if you were one of those subject please contact me and several people said if you do that and we have tried you will get people pretending to have been subjects who will want to tell you titillating and absolutely false stories. So i thought how can i get across to people what that would have been like. It is extraordinarily awkward situation to be in a Laboratory Setting with somebody in a white coat with a note pad who is going to say remove your clothes and proceed to do what you would ordinarily do, dont mind us, present we are not here so the way i got around that is i did find somebody, it is not common these days, there are not very many studies where two people are required to. If you are studying arousal or orgasm or whatever it is you can do that with one person if you know what i mean, you dont necessarily have to have two people. I found one study, and in london, it was the four dimensional ultrasound imaging study where they could make a four dimensional film of the body parts in question, i email him and i said i am interested in this next project. This was a legitimate Research Venture and i said i am interested in this historic undertaking. Could i be there in the room and he wrote back right away and he said yes, you could but unfortunately we are having difficulty finding a brave couple for intimate study so if your organization would like to provide a volunteer i would be happy to arrange it. So my Organization Called its husband, and i believe the way that i phrased it was not entirely forthcoming. I said you know how you say you havent been to london in 25 years and lets go and i will take care, everything, we will go to the west end, see some players, jeremy irons has a big beard now and will be a good show, we will go to stonehenge and have sex in front of a guy in a white coat and in that way he is a wonderful capacity for denial so he latched onto we are going to london and did not even think about the segment in which we were going to have this is called for a sound. People say you were filmed in an m r i tube, actually wasnt an mri to. In that case you would have privacy at least. Your cramped and uncomfortable but have privacy. With ultrasound the guy is right here with the bond. Tremendously awkward experience. At the same time i was thinking this will be so fun. So much fun to write. My husband deserves a medal for this because he didnt have any sort of silver lining. For him it was a really awkward thing and the burden of performance is on him. I could go into more detail but i dont think we need to right here. Host with your first book, mary roach, stiff the curious lives of human cadavers, the first line in that book is the human head is the approximate size and weight of a roast chicken. How did you discover that . One of the places i went to for stiff the curious lives of human cadavers, this is a book about postmortem careers, people who have donated their bodies to science research, education, and some of the more unusual places they end. Some people are familiar with the anatomy classes in dissection but there are a lot of other things did people have gone up to over the years, quite fascinating. One of them is the engines will use cadavers to practice and learn techniques, refreshed themselves, you dont want to practice on a live person so the dead are useful for practicing and the place that i went was a seminar for facial Reconstructive Surgeons and they were practicing some techniques on heads and people think why dont they have the whole body and with cadaver research, you dont want to waste usable tissue so the head would be in the reconstructive Plastic Surgery lab, the arm by be in a test of the power window to make sure somebodys hand in it that it will not be causing an injury, the legs might be anyway, you could be inside places at once as a research cadaver which is the ultimate smoky tasking. Anyway the heads have been set up, this is a long winded answer, they were in roasting pans of a sort that you would use to roast a chicken and because in fact they are about the same size so i made that observation, 30 heads in roasting pans in this surgical Training Seminar i was that in texas. Host who donates the body. Guest people who donate their bodies tend to be people like myself, practical, they paid door to door service and queue up and no rigmarole, if you want to you can do a service that dont have to. Plus you get this sort of wonderful feeling of having helped by making a donation to science, a contribution to science. That would require putting a value on dead body which is an interesting issue because dead bodies were cars, part by part if you add up each individual part, shipping and handling technically, but if you take the cost of each individual one and add them up, it is a greater number than it would be for a whole body. To put a figure should the irs audit, the irs will not audit you. And beyond the grave. Host is there a shortage of dead bodies . Guest yes and no. People depending on where you live, if you live somewhere near stanford, harvard, they love to donate to those schools, i am going to harvard, i always thought people who won the body programs had teachers made up that said i am going to harvard medical school. It is funny there could be two medical schools close by, there is due and another smaller college, it doesnt have the same prestige, quietly giving their surplus. There are regional surplus deficits, some place have plenty of bodies and others are always scrambling to get more. Host in stiff the curious lives of human cadavers you write it makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys of benefits of that control. People who make the leverett requests concerning disposition are probably, a concept of not existing. Guest that is the number one reason in my experience that people they are not going to donate, and research and education, i want to cure cancer, i dont want to be used in Plastic Surgery, people want to exert control over the circumstances. And it is a way of still being around, the prospect of no longer being a round. We are not going to be around to care or take issue. It is not a rational thing. People say you wrote this book, people donate your body to science, and paperwork of stanford and ucla medical school, it is in the radius where i live in the bay area so i have the paperwork, i am kind of a college senior, deciding where i want to go, what is the view like from the anatomy lab and the facilities, and had this irrational kind of desire and also think it is interesting he hasnt pulled the trigger, i havent filled out the form. It is my intent. To go off and be cremated, just seems wrong. Host remains of the author, will assure wont shea, you right you are concerned about ed and his take on your being donated . Guest he is very squeamish man and the thought of me being on a table. For him, focused on that, a roomful of strangers, plus youre dead, you look like crack, that is his concern, the thought of being parceled out was disturbing to him, one finger i realize in talking to medical emphasis and various people is the wishes of the living are more important than the wishes of the dead. Someone leaves elaborate plans, that is a tremendous impact on the living. It is hard enough to cope with the loss of somebody, then find out they wanted to be donated to science and going to be used in some sort of research or experiment and that is an upsetting thing for the family. The people who worked in will body programs will usually take the side of the living because the dead are dead and the living still have emotions and things to deal with. That circumstance does occasionally present itself where the family is very uncomfortable, go to an anatomy lab and medical research very upsetting for them and the university, pull the body away. Dramatic tugofwar going gone. Host being caught in possession of a corpses cufflinks with a crime being caught with the corpse itself carries no penalty. What kind of laws are there for body snatching, corpses, etc. Guest body snatching, grave robbing, grave robbing was the practice of stealing somebodys cufflinks, the family heirloom, the jewel. For a few centuries there was no need to add a lot about body snatching because who wants to go to the trouble of digging up the grave to pull up a dead body . No value for centuries, no value in a dead body but then the dawn of the Anatomy School in 1700s, 1800s and on, Anatomy Schools needed dead bodies, needed have material for dissection, no one back then filled out of body for man donated their bodies to science so if you wanted to study the human body, you wanted to teach anatomy, you had to pay a body snatcher. Resurrection this was another term that was used, they would go into cemeteries, would have been casing the cemetery because you have to have a fresh body, you dont want to practice dissection, decomposed body, a skeleton and dig up the body and take it to the Anatomy School, the guy who runs it and would be paid for the bodies and they did quite well and i have a number in stiff the curious lives of human cadavers of the number of part and fulltime resurrection this employed in london, edinburgh, i dont remember that number but it was a popular way to make a living. Even then there was a shortage because of some of the schools back then there was one instance where you could pay part of your tuition in bodies. It is a midnight prank, dig up the grave, bring it in and get tuition credit and a discount on tuition if you provide some material. Host you write that the instructors became known as the kind of guys you could take your sons amputated leg and sell it for beer money, thirtyseven. Five cents. It happened in rochester new york gittin 31. Welcome to booktvs indepth. Our guest is author mary roach. And she began writing books in 2003 and the first book is stiff the curious lives of human cadavers. All her books are New York Times bestsellers. Second book came out in 2005, spook science tackles the afterlife. Bonk the curious coupling of science and sex him out in 2008, packing for mars in 2010, curious science of life in the void and a most recent just came out, a month or two ago, gulp adventures on the alimentary canal. 202 if youd like to participate in live program this afternoon, 585388 zero, 5853881 in the mountain and pacific time zones, email us at booktv cspan. Org and you can make a comment on our face book page. For mary roach, facebook. Com booktv or on our twitter feed booktv is the address there. Mary roach, where did you grow up, when did you become a writer and why the topics that you pick . When did you start being interested in this stuff . Guest i was born in hanover, New Hampshire and grew up in that area, the upper valley which includes a little