Stiff Chapters 10-12

If someone mentions cannibalism, medicinal use is not an association I make. In chapter 10, "Eat Me", cannibalism was discussed and it was not just a group of crazy people who lived in the woods with a diet of strangers who wandered too closely to their village, as that is the association I have always come up with. Cannibalism was explained through medicinal uses and the way that cadavers were utilized for  the curing of the living sick. Some of the examples given were still difficult for me to read and imagine those scenarios occurring. For instance, some of the uses for body parts and wastes used for illness such as "diabetics were to be treated with 'a cup of urine from a public latrine'" or human fat used to treat rheumatism and joint pain is a process that makes me uneasy. Yet, a good point is brought up on page 229, "We see nothing distasteful in injections of human blood, yet the thought of soaking in it makes us cringe"To me this makes sense, while some of the treatments seem outlandish, and downright gross, if unorthodox methods are still useful and working, maybe it is, in a matter of medical history, just a way of life when further technology was lacking. Also, it is interesting that we do use blood transfusions and see no harm in it, yet a medicinal use of bathing in blood or drinking it, as in the first attempt at a blood transfusion, is something we wouldn't dream of doing now.