According to Lisa Cartwright, an American expert on visual culture and gender studies, the Visible Human Project ‘stands a strong chance of becoming the international gold standard for human anatomy in coming years’. It is far more than just a visual record. Its sliced and reassembled human bodies can be experienced and manipulated. They provide an immersive virtual environment. Naturally, the dream now extends to ‘animating’ the bodies.
Nevertheless, the Visible Human Project has its flaws. Because it presents the internal body as it is, it is paradoxically not always a useful teaching aid. The sheer density of detail makes it hard to pick out what matters. It is a complement to, not a substitute for, the neat, colour-coded diagrams of medical textbooks. The way the data is organized in horizontal slices through the body conflicts with what trainee doctors will see later in clinical medical images, where the plane of the image may be at a different angle, or the body positioned in a different way, and so on. In a strange way, these images may have more to say to the lay person. They give us a new view of ourselves as we really are.
In this sense, the Visible Human Project may be seen as the antithesis of the better-known Human Genome Project. Whereas the decoded human genome yields an inscrutable list of letters and numbers describing the thousands of genes and the exact sequence of billions of amino acids that comprise human DNA, the Visible Human Project shows us two real people. According to the Australian social scientist Catherine Waldby, each aspires to be, and is in its way, an ‘exhaustive archive of human information’, but only the Visible Human Project is ‘spectacular’. And, if, as Wittgenstein tells us, ‘the human body is still the best picture of the human soul’, then it is perhaps the best answer we have yet to the long-held urge to visualize the self.
Now, let’s take our own slice of human flesh.
Flesh
How much is a pound of flesh?
To Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, it is beyond price: ‘The pound of flesh which I demand of him / Is dearly bought, ’tis mine, and I will have it.’ The merchant Antonio, you will remember, is strapped for cash while he waits for his ships to come in. He has agreed nevertheless to support his impecunious friend Bassanio in his plan to travel to Belmont, there to woo the lovely (and rich) Portia, and has sent him off to raise the necessary 3,000 ducats, for which he, Antonio, will stand bond. Bassanio finds the Jewish moneylender and they agree terms. Unusually, Shylock asks for no interest, but demands instead the forfeit of a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he proves unable to repay the loan. Shylock and Antonio are enemies and business rivals, not least because Antonio undercuts Shylock’s usury by lending money to his friends interest-free, as Christian doctrine demands. When the loan comes due three months later, Antonio is indeed unable to repay it, thinking his ships to be wrecked, and the unhappy matter comes to court. In desperation, Bassanio offers Shylock his capital back and the same amount again, a total of 6,000 ducats (the money suddenly available from his betrothed Portia). But Shylock haughtily refuses six times as much. ‘I would have my bond,’ he insists.
What of this pound of flesh in physical terms? Is its removal supposed to be survivable? Shakespeare has his characters consider the matter in some detail. It is clear in the play that it is Shylock himself who is to wield the knife – Jews were some of the best surgeons and anatomists of the day. But where will he bring it down? When terms are agreed, Shylock stipulates that the flesh is ‘to be cut off and taken / In what part of your body pleaseth me’. In court, though, he is told by the ‘doctor of law’ brought in to adjudicate on the matter (in fact Portia in disguise) that the flesh is ‘to be by him cut off / Nearest the merchant’s heart’, with the contradictory injunction added for him to ‘Be merciful’.
The pound of flesh is not Shakespeare’s invention. He may have got it from ‘Englished’ Italian sources or indirectly from the fourteenth-century Cursor Mundi, written in Northumbrian dialect. In this version, the Jew, brought to the court of one Queen Ellen, vows to take his victim’s flesh in the most hurtful manner possible, by cutting out the eyes, hands, tongue, nose ‘and so on until the covenant be fulfilled’. The forfeit has echoes of legally sanctioned punishment by amputation.
It is always hard to estimate how much any part of the body weighs since it is for most normal purposes inseparable from the whole. But it is possible to get some sense of what a pound of flesh might amount to. Human and animal flesh are of roughly equal density, so a pound of beefsteak gives a good visual impression. A more memorable method is to dunk your hand in a brimming bucket of water until the displaced liquid weighs this amount (water also being about the same density as the human body). In my case, I find the chop comes a couple of inches above the wrist. Alternatively, a pound would take off most of a man’s foot. Of the organs I was able to handle at the Ruskin School, the heart came closest to the required weight. A dissected heart weighs about two-thirds of a pound. Dripping with fresh blood, it might weigh a pound.
Yet Shylock is told he may not take the heart, merely the flesh around it. In general, then, flesh is characterized by what it is not. It is not the organs, which do particular jobs in the body. In animals, flesh is used to mean the edible meat, apart from the offal (the meat allowed to fall off the butcher’s block). Neither is it hard bone. The biblical phrase ‘flesh and bones’ implies that flesh is soft. ‘Flesh and blood’ – a phrase Shakespeare uses many times in his plays – meanwhile suggests that flesh is solid in contrast to running blood. Although it may on occasion be synonymous with the skin, flesh is not skin either. Flesh is also distinct from ‘spirit’; indeed the two are opposed in constant moral battle. The flesh then is the physical bulk of the body, principally muscle but also the fat. Flesh has depth. We may cut into its thickness. We imagine it in three dimensions. In his celebrated essay ‘On the Cannibals’, Montaigne writes vividly of tribes who might roast a captured enemy and then send ‘chunks of his flesh to absent friends’.
We never find out which chunk of Antonio’s anatomy is to go, of course. Quick-thinking Portia examines the letter of the contract, and observes that it specifies a pound of flesh, no more and no less. She rules that Shylock may have his pound of flesh, provided he sheds not ‘One drop of Christian blood’, and takes an exact pound to within a twentieth of a scruple (a scruple was little more than a gramme).
This judicial pronouncement is meant to pose a moral conundrum, not merely a dissector’s dilemma. The lawyer’s interpretation follows biblical convention in generally distinguishing flesh from blood. In Jewish doctrine, the flesh is the body (they share the Hebrew word bâsâr). But then, as Leviticus tells us, ‘the life of the flesh is in the blood’. So there is an important distinction to be made between the two. Where ‘flesh and blood’ appear yoked together in the Bible it is usually in reference to burnt offerings and animal sacrifices. Because his bodily flesh may be taken but not his vital blood, we understand at least that Antonio is not to be sacrificed in this brute fashion.
Bodies and their parts abound in Shakespeare. ‘Flesh’ occurs 142 times, with The Merchant of Venice employing the word twice as much as any other play. There are 1,047 ‘heart’s in the plays and sonnets, with another 208 ‘heartily’s, ‘sweet-heart’s and other variations. King Lear has the highest count with thirty-nine, not Romeo and Juliet as you might expect. ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’, Cordelia answers viscerally to her father’s demand to know whether she loves him any more than her voluble sisters do. There is even a subtle indication that she truly is her father’s dearest daughter in her name: Cordelia, Shakespeare scholars have noted, is homonymous with cor-de-Lear (heart of Lear).
By his own admission, Hamlet is ‘pigeon-liver’d, and lack[s] gall’. The Dane also accounts for the single occurrence of ankles in Shakespeare, when he appears before Ophelia, ‘his stocking fouled, / Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle; / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other’. Macbeth speaks of his ‘barefaced power’ – the first English usage of the adj
ective. ‘Lily-liver’d’ is Shakespeare’s coinage too, used twice, in Macbeth and Lear. A pale liver was thought to be a sign of weakness, related to its then presumed role in generating blood and bodily heat. There are heads and hands, eyes and ears by the hundred, but more significantly also 82 brains, 44 stomachs and 37 bellies, 29 spleens, 20 lungs, 12 guts, 9 nerves and a lone kidney, which crops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Falstaff seeks to paint himself as a pitiable figure as he recounts the indignities he has suffered at the hands of the ‘merry wives’ – ‘a man of my kidney’, as he splutters incredulously. Indeed, no character in Shakespeare is more splendidly corporeal than Falstaff, who has in this same scene already reminded us how, in the course of one of the women’s tricks, his vast, collapsing form was ‘carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher’s offal’.
Shakespeare was writing at a time of crisis in the development of our understanding of the human body. It was around this time that the body was given, as it were, a hard outline in contradistinction to the rest of the world. We became homo clausus, as the sociologist Norbert Elias labels us: closed-off man. I’m not entirely sure I buy this theory. Surely the living body has always been an impenetrable mystery. When I scratch because I have some itch below the surface, I know its cause will remain hidden to me by my skin. And so it was always. I am tantalized by the thought that if only I could see through it, just briefly part it even, then I could deal with the problem more effectively. Doctors must feel this frustration still more keenly. Yet this is apparently a modern thought. According to the theorists, it simply was not within the imaginative compass of itchy medievals to think in this way. They would have sought their answers to the hidden body’s ailments exteriorly, perhaps by looking to astrology and magic.
The rise of anatomy is part of this shift, for the urge to open up the body demands that it is closed to begin with. The anatomist, like the sceptic, must see with his eyes in order to believe and understand. Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica threw open the doors to this inner world. People began to speak more boldly and unashamedly in bodily terms. Even Queen Elizabeth assured her troops preparing to repel the Spanish Armada: ‘I know that I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too.’ Shakespeare’s abundant references not only to external parts of the body but to the innards that we so rarely see are the writer’s response to new literary possibilities. The body’s parts provide a wealth of fresh images and metaphors. The Italian historian of medicine Arturo Castiglioni even makes the claim that Shakespeare got the idea for his most famous visual scene, where Hamlet in the graveyard picks up the skull of the king’s former jester and holds it in his hand while speaking the lines ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’, from one of the illustrations in Vesalius, which shows ‘a skeleton in meditation’, with its right hand resting on a skull placed on the stone tomb in front of it.
Shakespeare goes further than his contemporaries into this new world of language. He is medically literate, and includes somewhere in his plays references to most of the diseases and remedies of the day. More than this, his use of corporeal images encourages our involvement in the drama and produces in us a strong identification with his characters. This distinguishes him from his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and even the bloodthirsty John Webster. And, of course, the new language and juicy metaphors based on body parts could only work dramatically if Shakespeare’s audiences already shared his sense of the human body.
It is Hamlet who wrestles most with the meaning of human embodiment, using successive scenes to probe the question ever more deeply. Is the embodied self bounded by the physical edges of the body? Upon what he calls Hamlet’s ‘transformation’, his uncle Claudius, the new king, observes that ‘nor th’ exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was’. Hamlet says of himself: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.’ As it is, he struggles to reconcile the confines of his body with the scale of his increasingly crazy ideas. Hamlet dreams: ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.’ And in his most famous soliloquy, he weighs the possibility of ending for ever ‘The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’.
In Macbeth, it is images of blood that predominate. Blood slops and surges through the play like a river bursting its banks. No longer properly contained within the body, it stains daggers and hands and faces. It even spills out of the drama itself and into the real world of the theatre to ‘Threaten this bloody stage’, as one character announces. The witches stir baboon’s blood and sow’s blood into their cauldron. By Act Three, Macbeth is in so deep he finds he must ‘wade’ in blood. Scotland, like Denmark, is a body: ‘Bleed, bleed, poor country!’ says Macduff. ‘It weeps, it bleeds,’ concurs Malcolm a few lines later.
Almost equally liquid imagery accompanies Falstaff – that barrow load of ‘butcher’s offal’ – through the action of three plays. In Henry IV, Part I, the fit young Prince Henry repeatedly taunts Falstaff about his alarmingly mobile insides: ‘you carried your guts away’, ‘that stuffed cloak-bag of guts’, ‘how would thy guts fall about thy knees!’ Again, the two characters represent facets of the body politic, presently soft and flabby, but with the potential to become lean and efficient. We hear the same language today, for instance from fiscal conservatives who routinely refer to state budgets as ‘bloated’. Indeed, it seems doubtful whether a conspicuously fat person could be elected as a national leader today, even in countries where obesity is epidemic among the electorate.
Before closing the lid on Shakespeare’s body, we should pause to consider ‘this mortal coil’, the most famous vital image of all in the most famous speech of all, Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy. What is it? Shakespeare’s strange and powerful phrase naturally suggests many things. The word coil meant turmoil or trouble in the sixteenth century. A coil was a colloquial term for a noise and bustle, derived from its original meaning as a verb to heap up, gather or collect, from the French coillir. Yet at the very moment when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, ‘coil’ was also coming to mean an altogether neater arrangement of stacked loops. The word seems perfectly suited to describing the chaotic architecture of the human intestines (Hamlet has a preoccupation with the guts, as we have seen), and, more broadly, to communicating a sense of life as a tangled journey both with a beginning and an end and yet also with a cyclical, repeating aspect. Anachronistically, it cannot help but suggest, too, the doubled helical coils of DNA, the molecule of life.
Falstaff’s distinctive physical characteristic is, of course, his fatness. He is the ‘fat knight’, a ‘fat rogue’, and, more satisfyingly abusive, ‘whoreson round man’. To be fat, as Prince Henry scorns, is to sit around being lazy and useless. It is left to Falstaff bitterly to point out that fat has its uses. Aren’t fat cattle preferable to the ‘Pharaoh’s lean kine’, he asks. And what of human fat? Towards the end of The Merry Wives, Falstaff complains of all the deceptions to which he has been subjected by adversaries who might ‘melt me out of my fat drop by drop and liquor fishermen’s boots with me’. In Shakespeare’s time, human fat was rendered from the bodies of executed and dissected criminals. Called ‘oil of man’, it was used at least until the end of the eighteenth century as an ointment for wasted limbs – and doubtless, on occasion, too, for waterproofing boots.
I’m reminded of the problematic nature of fat when I see an unusual wax model of a dissected body at the Boerhaave Museum. In the early nineteenth century, Petrus Koning, a morbid anatomist at Utrecht University, took the unusual step of making realistic wax models rather than the idealized versions typically crafted in Italy. Wax models were made as durable substitutes for cadavers for the instruction of medical students. Realism was the ostensible aim of their gifted creators, but some tidying up clearly went on, and sometimes an allegorical dimension crept into the works. They remain more beautiful and affecting than the brig
htly coloured plastic kits that have superseded them. Koning’s departure was to extend the realism of his models to include the yellow layers of fat that other artists chose to omit – and that continue to be left out of today’s plastic models.
Our attitude towards our own fat is highly ambivalent. In Genesis, Pharaoh promises that his followers shall eat ‘the fat of the land’, and it is clear that the fat is the best of what the land can offer. In times when few people could aspire to being fat, fatness was an ideal in itself, a sign of prosperity and health. Wanting for nothing, rulers from Hapshepsut to William the Conqueror to Henry VIII all attained a fine girth. Extreme obesity was not unheard of either. The Greek physician Galen attended one Nichomachus of Smyrna, who was apparently unable to move from his bed for sheer weight. What the philosopher Susan Bordo calls the ‘tyranny of slenderness’ only began to assert itself in the late Victorian period among a few of the wealthy who reacted ascetically to the greater abundance of food. New scientific ideas about diet and exercise helped them in this direction, as, surely, did the invention of the bathroom scales around this time. It is telling that the latest versions of such scales send small electric currents through your body so as to track changes in the weight of your fat quite separately from the weight of your body overall.
One response to the growing fashion for thinness was to find new labels to suit those who were not thin. The splendid adjective Rubenesque dates from 1913. Derived from the voluptuous nudes painted by Peter Paul Rubens three centuries before, it is a reminder that ‘fleshy’ was not always bad. A Rubenesque figure is a paradox in the world where size zero is queen. It means not fat, not even large, but somewhat plump and definitely curvaceous – and desirable, not repulsive. It suggests soft flesh, not the hard body of homo clausus: more Marilyn Monroe than late-period Madonna.
Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body Page 6