A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong

major characters in body decomposition are the maggots – I mean, the flies are the first ones to get there, and they do the greatest reduction of a body. Well, I didn’t know anything about maggots, so I looked in the literature and there was very little in there. I won’t say there was nothing, but there wasn’t much dealing with length of time since death. So I decided, ‘You know, if I’m talking to the police about how long somebody’s been dead, I better know something about it.’ So I went to the dean, and asked if I could have some land to put dead bodies on.

      I started up with the sow barn at the Holston Farm, which is about 12 miles up the river from where we are right now. We used that from 1971 until 1980. Now business was really expanding, so I asked for more land. Where we are right now was where the university used to burn its trash, and sometime in the 1960s the Environmental Protection Agency said, ‘You can’t have open burning.’ So they covered this over with dirt and it just grew up with bushes. And I reckon they figured, ‘It’s been a dump for all these years, might as well go give it to Dr Bass for his dead bodies!’ There are somewhere between two and three acres right here.

      This is way over-used, by the way: there are about 150 bodies out here right now. And we don’t have any sterile land, if you want to call it that, for a student wanting to do research – there have been bodies put almost anywhere you can put a body. So we went back to the university and got some additional land.