30 Sep 2011 10:14:41
It recounts Julius Caesar's attempt to cure his baldness and Cleopatra's recommendation: the bodies of domestic mice, burnt and ground up, horse teeth mixed with bear grease, and marrow from deer bones.
That pulls you into the effects of a French king's contrivance to mask his own loss of hair: a voluminous, powdered, curly wig. Distinguished men — see portraits of George Washington and other Founding Fathers — wore powdered wigs for almost two centuries. After Louis XIV comes a remedy Napoleon tried. It consisted mainly of dogs' paws and the hooves of a certain animal.
If you read on for another 188 pages, you'll find that Adolf Hitler — though he didn't make the list — also knew of a "miracle cure" for baldness, from which he hoped to make his fortune. Ingredients and actual profitability are not given.
So don't start "10 Ways to Recycle a Corpse" at bedtime. You may lose a lot of sleep. The book's subtitle warns that it includes "100 More Dreadfully Distasteful Lists."
One chapter justifies the book's title, suggesting profitable and mostly legal ways to dispose of dead bodies. One is to sell parts to legitimate trading companies, which resell them to recognized medical organizations.
Top prices (2010) include tendons at $1,000 each. Corneas fetch $6,000 a pair, the book says, but adds that it's illegal to sell human body fat to cosmetic firms.
