| | Introduction | p. 9 |
| | A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Practicing surgery on the dead | p. 19 |
| | Crimes of Anatomy: Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection | p. 37 |
| | Life After Death: On human decay and what can be done about it | p. 61 |
| | Dead Man Driving: Human crash test dummies and the ghastly, necessary science of impact tolerance | p. 87 |
| | Beyond the Black Box: When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash | p. 113 |
| | The Cadaver Who Joined the Army: The sticky ethics of bullets and bombs | p. 131 |
| | Holy Cadaver: The crucifixion experiments | p. 157 |
| | How to Know if You're Dead: Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul | p. 167 |
| | Just a Head: Decapitation, reanimation, and the human head transplant | p. 199 |
| | Eat Me: Medicinal cannibalism and the case of the human dumplings | p. 221 |
| | Out of the Fire, Into the Compost Bin: And other new ways to end up | p. 251 |
| | Remains of the Author: Will she or won't she? | p. 281 |
| | Acknowledgments | p. 293 |
| | Bibliography | p. 295 |