You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don't use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless.
In "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," Mary Roach discusses an intriguing question regarding the use of crash test dummies in safety testing. While dummies provide valuable data on the forces experienced during crashes, this information lacks context without understanding the actual limits of human body parts. Essentially, knowing how much impact a dummy endures is meaningless unless we also know how much a real human body can withstand.
This...
