While you'd probably entrust Jimmy the Intern with the task of, say, removing your appendix -- really, it's the fifth wheel of organs -- there's no way in hell you'd let an inexperienced surgeon anywhere near your pretty, pretty face. Luckily, there's an effective way for med students to hone their skills without damaging the ol' moneymaker.

Yep! Plastic surgeons practice on dead folks.

IMCAS Congress
The above footage is from a "cadaver workshop," which sounds like something Pinhead has in his basement.

Countless courses allow surgeons to practice procedures like nose jobs on honest-to-goodness decapitated heads. Why decapitated? Because the rest of the body can be put to better use elsewhere (punching shit, for example), and the scientific community is anything but wasteful. Horrific, disturbing, nightmare-inducing -- never wasteful, though.

University of Michigan
"So what do you do for a living?"
"I chop heads off cadavers for medical students."

We might need one of those doctors to take a look at our sprained diaphragms after all the screaming we just did. Luckily they trained on only the finest of corpses.

By screwing one end of a sling into the bone at the corner of the eye and fastening the other end to a pacemaker-like contraption hidden in the natural hollow of the temple, the paralyzed (but now bionic!) eyelid can be made to blink in tandem with the other, healthy eye. That is, if the patient is still alive. When testing the system on a cadaver, the result is one working eyelid and the heavy psychological trauma of having just been hit on by a zombie.

University of California Regents
"Hey baby, wanna get assimilated?"

Disturbing new fetishes aside, this procedure holds considerable promise: Eyelid transplants, for example, have the inherent fault of leaving some other part of the body weakened, while gravity-based systems tend to malfunction as the patient is trying to sleep. Of course, you could always just show said patient these GIFs of suave corpses, thereby thoroughly erasing their desire to ever sleep again. Problem solved!

Though, officially speaking, car manufacturers will deny it to hell and back, cadaver testing is still alive and well. Because the best way to see how well a new safety feature will protect the human body is to destroy a few human bodies.

Wired
Using chimps just made the testers sad.

That's a cause you can no doubt get behind -- tens of thousands of people die in car crashes each year -- but what if the safety testing being performed was less dire? Would you, for instance, be willing to toss your earthly remains toward the selfless purpose of keeping the kiddies' fingers safe while carving pumpkins this Halloween? Because scientists used actual human hands to test just that.

Preventive Medicine via Smithsonian Magazine
Someone really needs to teach that corpse how to hold a knife properly.

In another example, researchers used actual human legs to test which type of terrain is most likely to cause ligament tears in athletes. (It's AstroTurf.)

Wired
It's good to know that the researchers have the same facial expression we do on seeing that.

So while you may have highfalutin ideas of what it means to donate your body to science -- picturing your corpse being rocketed into space to become the first corpse on Mars, perhaps -- the likelihood is that you'll just wind up slapping at walls and tripping on fake grass like an undead spaz. Well, at least you're the same in death as in life.

Deep inside us all -- behind our political leanings, moral codes, and private biases -- there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful that we can't help but proselytize about it to the world. In the next live episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

For more ways science got a little weird, check out The 10 Craziest Scientific Experiments Ever Conducted and 23 Real-Life Mad Scientists Deleted From Your History Books.

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