Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Like its related field of phrenology, physiognomy is now scientifically discredited. Its chief adherents today are those many authors whose characters’ described appearance gives the clue to their behaviour and personality – Charles Dickens’s notorious miser Ebenezer Scrooge, of whom we are told: ‘The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue,’ or Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, whose ‘self-complacent’ mouth and serpent eyes, described in an opening chapter given over entirely to the arguable matter of her beauty, hint at her later manipulative behaviour, or the unappealing Keith Talent in Martin Amis’s London Fields, whose eyes shine ‘with tremendous accommodations made to money’ but without ‘enough blood’ for murder – and the millions of readers who happily go along with the fiction.

  Provoked, perhaps, by Galton’s slur on the girls of Aberdeen, Scottish psychologists have been peculiarly active in recent research into our perception of the human face. Computers now allow scientists to manipulate facial images in ways that permit more probing investigation than Galton could ever have achieved with his coins and composites. One particularly striking project, undertaken by Rachel Edwards at the University of St Andrews, involved altering a portrait of Elizabeth I to make it look as if she was using modern cosmetics. Her familiar alabaster foundation – in fact, a poisonous paste of lead white – was replaced by a light tan and an application of blusher. At a stroke, the exercise confirmed the fabled beauty of the virgin queen and provided a convincing demonstration of just how powerful a cultural influence make-up is on our judgement of beauty in appearance.

  However, most current studies focus on facial recognition rather than the perception of beauty. Generally, it is more important to be able to recognize a real person than it is to construct an artificial ideal. Galton found this out to his cost one day when he sent some composite photographs he had made of a pair of sisters to their father. ‘I am exceedingly obliged for the very curious and interesting composite portraits of my two children,’ the father wrote back. ‘Knowing the faces so well, it caused me quite a surprise when I opened your letter. I put one of the full faces on the table for the mother to pick up casually. She said, “When did you do this portrait of A? How like she is to B! Or is it B? I never thought they were so like before.”’ This was an unusually polite response. Most of his recipients, Galton commented ruefully, ‘seldom seem to care much for the result, except as a curiosity’. Galton did not dwell on precisely why people should care about his efforts to make them look more average. But he surely drew the correct conclusion from the rebuffs he received when he added: ‘We are all inclined to assert our individuality.’

  Identifying an individual, it turns out, is not simply a matter of presenting an accurate likeness. Philip Benson and David Perrett, also at St Andrews, recorded digital images of various faces, and then exaggerated distinctive features to produce a range of more or less extreme caricatures of each one. When they asked people to select the best likeness from the range, the one they tended to pick out was not the true portrait but a slight caricature.

  We are actually quite good at identifying faces. It is what psychologists call a natural task. We do it by detecting their overall symmetry, and in particular the inverted triangle described by the eyes and the mouth. The eyes are important because they communicate emotion, while we look to the mouth for signs of pleasure or disgust. This is why we do not notice that Mona Lisa has no eyebrows, or that the South Park kids have no noses. Because recognizing faces is so natural, special training, such as that sometimes given to police officers, may actually lead to worse results rather than better, if it disrupts the subconscious image-processing mechanisms at work.

  Recalling and identifying a face for ourselves is one thing. But to describe a face so that another person can then identify it as well is a quite different proposition. In these circumstances, we do it by breaking the face down into the bits of it for which we have words. So we start to talk about the eyes, nose, mouth and so on, and perhaps a general head shape (round, almond-shaped, angular, etc.). In addition to functional organs, our conversational inventory of facial components also includes features such as cheekbones, chin and forehead, eyebrows and hairline. The ears may or may not be deemed important according to their prominence (except in Swedish passports, for which it is a requirement that the holder be photographed at an angle so that one ear is visible). Yet this list does not accurately reflect the way we actually identify any face. It is simply the readiest means of communicating what we take to be the characteristic features that make identification possible.

  As so often, Leonardo da Vinci may have been the first to assemble an inventory of drawn representations of human facial features, which he did in order to be able to teach fellow artists how to produce recognizable portraits based on only a brief glance at their subject. But in general, from medieval times and through the rise of painted portraits right up until the advent of photography, people were usually identified by means that appear dangerously unreliable to us today, based on signed papers and objects they carried with them, the one set of clothes that they wore, or various distinguishing marks or traits. Sixteenth-century woodcuts of notorious criminals may look like modern wanted posters, but they were invariably produced to broadcast the good news after the criminal had been caught. The idea of producing a likeness in advance, working from people’s memories rather than from a living (or by then perhaps dead) subject, did not occur until much later.

  In the 1960s, many police forces, looking to improve ways of identifying crime suspects, seized on the fact that we describe faces by breaking them down into parts. Early systems such as the American Identikit, using line drawings, and the British Photofit, using photographs, enabled witnesses to piece together an image of a suspect like a jigsaw, using pieces taken from a picture library of stock facial components. The methods worked well in interviews because they relied on a common vocabulary – and seemed more analytical than working with a sketch artist – but produced poor results in terms of likeness. Increasingly, these systems are seen as unsatisfactory because they do not reflect the way we actually recognize faces. More powerful computers gradually brought improvements. The E-fit system developed by John Shepherd, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen, works from a database of complete facial images which may be manipulated and blended according to a witness’s instructions to produce a preferred impression. An early triumph of E-fit came in July 1993, when the London serial killer Colin Ireland gave himself up to the police, having realized how closely he resembled his circulated E-fit image.

  More recent developments acknowledge the fact that we recognize faces in a holistic way. The Evo-fit system, developed at the University of Stirling, proceeds by showing witnesses a ‘line-up’ of six real faces from which they pick the best likeness. Of course, it is unlikely that the resemblance will be very close at first, but the procedure is repeated with the best likenesses found at each pass made to ‘breed’ together to ‘evolve’ a closer final composite. In effect, the method allows the witness to select for distinguishing facial characteristics while the focus of the exercise is kept on whole faces.

  The mistaking of mere resemblance for true identity is a principal cause of miscarriages of justice. This is the true reason behind the Scottish strength in research in this field, which received its initial stimulus from the United Kingdom Home Office following a 1976 government committee investigation into cases where courts had been misled by faulty visual identification. When we say ‘his face is printed on my brain’ or some such, that may be true as far as it goes. But a slight alteration in that face – a shave, a tan, a haircut, even the same face seen from a new angle – may be enough to confound recognition. In other words, we remember pictures, freeze-frame moments, but we know people.

  Or, we think we do. On 18 October 1997, a boy who had gone missing three years earlier was apparently reuni
ted with his family in Texas, having been found in a youth shelter in Spain. At San Antonio airport, ‘Nicholas’ was met with hugs and tears from his sister and other relatives. His mother was there too, but held back from the general jubilation. At home over the coming weeks, the boy settled back into normal life, went to school and was able to recall family incidents. If one or two people suspected something was not quite right, the police and immigration officials were on hand to reassure them everything was in order. After a couple of months, however, ‘Nicholas’ began to unravel. Finally, in March 1998, five months after taking the boy in, the mother communicated her suspicion that he was an impostor, and a cruel deception was exposed. The sixteen-year-old American ‘Nicholas’ was shown to be Frédéric Bourdin, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman with bleached hair and a talent for memorizing the details of other people’s lives. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for perjury and obtaining false documents. On his release, he resumed his career as a serial child impostor, and in 2005 was discovered once more, this time back in France, claiming to be Francisco, a Spanish orphan. The real Nicholas has never been traced.

  Society has a desperate requirement that we be in fact exactly who we appear to be. It is not just the Lavaters and the Galtons who want Christ to look virtuous and criminals to look properly vicious. If appearances do not correspond with what we think we know, then the rest of us – in the family, in the community, in authority – are liable to be profoundly unsettled. We may feel affronted, ashamed and threatened when we suddenly learn that somebody in whom we have placed our trust is not what they appear to be. So strong is our need for people to conform to our expectation of them that many conventional statements of identity, including visual likeness, may be overlooked if to do so produces a neater fit. This is what happened to Frédéric / Nicholas. The found boy was too good to be disbelieved; he fulfilled that family’s need and tidied up the case-books of the authorities. Such was the social pressure that even the doubting mother was persuaded to accept the impostor.

  Personal identity is an act. Most of us settle into one ‘character’ and maintain it without too much difficulty, in part at least because that is what society requires us to do. Pressure to keep up the act is constant, and we cannot always manage it. So we set aside special times (hen nights, say) and special places (such as on the theatre stage) where we no longer have to be who we are; indeed, it becomes socially necessary that we ‘are’ someone else. In more extreme cases, the balancing act fails with catastrophic results. Bourdin was not able to ‘be’ himself, so he sought to get along by ‘being’ other people. Yet the underlying wish is not to pretend, but to belong – for the act to become the life. Unable to sustain the act of his true self, he tried out other acts one after another, but was eventually unable to sustain them as well.

  Often what is most astonishing in such stories is not the impersonation, the act performed more or less successfully by the central figure, but the reaction of those around them. As bystanders, we permit ourselves the luxury of being stunned at the apparent credulousness of these people: how on earth can they be duped, we wonder. But from within the story it is clear that their attitude arises from the need to believe, for the sake of personal psychological survival and social cohesion, that the person really is who he or she claims to be. Take the famous story of the return of Martin Guerre. In the mid sixteenth century, a well-to-do peasant by the name of Guerre abruptly leaves his Pyrenean village home and his wife and child with no cause or explanation. Years later, a man returns and is accepted back as Guerre by the wife and by the village. All runs smoothly for a few more years until the wife takes him to court, now claiming that he is an impostor. As the court case is about to be resolved (in the man’s favour, you may not be surprised to learn, and besides the rest of the community has no special reason to doubt his identity), the real Martin Guerre makes a dramatic reappearance, minus his leg, as he has been away at the wars.

  The psychological core of the story is really Guerre’s wife, Bertrande de Rols. Was she a simple woman deceived by the impostor, as other people were, and as (men’s) accounts of the episode have suggested? Or was there, as Natalie Zemon Davis, the cultural historian who brought the episode to wider notice, has suggested, reason enough for Bertrande to go along with the pretence? Her status had been much reduced by Guerre’s abandonment, and she needed to secure an inheritance for her son. Here suddenly was a plausible and perhaps more satisfactory new mate. ‘Beyond a young womanhood with only a brief period of sexuality, beyond a marriage in which her husband understood her little, may have feared her, and surely abandoned her, Bertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different,’ Davis speculates.

  Such dramas animate some of the most fundamental and puzzling questions about identity. How do we know we are the same person we were ten minutes or ten years ago? How do our loved ones and others know? Is it even important to be the same and to know it? A Guerre may raise doubts, but when our partner returns from work we are sure it is the same person who left that morning. How we establish this to our satisfaction is no trivial matter. And then, what are we to make of the fact that our body’s cells are completely renewed over a period of seven years or so, so that we are materially not the same person at all? The face is our chief frame of recognition, though movement, gesture and voice are important too. Yet the face also changes with age. In what sense do we remain the same really?

  Philosophers have always puzzled over what makes somebody a recognizable individual. John Locke and David Hume asserted that consciousness, and continuity of consciousness in memory, were the sine qua non of personal identity. To Hume, ‘the principle of individuation is nothing but the invariableness and uninterruptedness of any object, thro’ a suppos’d variation of time, by which the mind can trace it in the different periods of its existence, without any break of the view’. Sleep does not constitute such a break because we remember the previous day. But a gap of several years? Well, perhaps that’s another matter.

  Recent philosophical speculation has tended to focus on hypothetical scenarios in which continuity of self-identity is suddenly disrupted. We are required to imagine, for example, that a person’s mind and body are somehow separated from one another and shuffled around in various ways in space and time. But these various thought experiments in time travel, teleportation and body-swapping seem to have added little understanding. Imagining the mind of one person placed into the body of another immediately runs into the problem of the body – is it necessarily of the same gender? Must it feel similar or the same? Imagining a person transported back in time and given the appearance and memories of some historical figure doesn’t work either. We can’t say that the person then is the historical figure because anyone else could have been similarly transported too. The hope of these intellectual exercises is to discover what – since it appears that we have no soul and no other lesser part of us contains our ‘self’ – really makes us who we are. The experts conclude, rather apologetically I get the sense, that our identity resides in the person most like ‘us’ a moment ago or a step away – the so-called ‘closest continuer theory’. This seems hardly good enough when pushed up against the raw human dramas of taken and mistaken identity.

  Neither does it do much to prepare us for the future.

  In November 2005, a thirty-eight-year-old Frenchwoman, Isabelle Dinoire, received the world’s first partial face transplant at a hospital in Amiens after her dog had chewed off her nose and mouth as she lay unconscious, having taken a drug overdose. More than a dozen similar operations have been performed since then, in France, Spain, China and the United States. The first full facial transplant operation was performed in March 2010 at a hospital in Barcelona on a farmer who had accidentally shot himself in the face. In Britain, a facial transplant team at the Royal Free Hospital in London has ethical clearance to perform four transplant operations which will be monitored as clinical trials. The first operation will go ahead as soon as a
suitable recipient and donor have been matched.

  I have come to the hospital to talk not to Peter Butler, who will lead the team of thirty surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses, but to Alex Clarke, the consultant clinical psychologist who is working with him on this challenging project. It is her job to prepare potential transplant recipients, but the thrust of her work, given that facial transplant is still a novelty, has been in helping people come to terms with disfigurement rather than dealing with the different set of issues raised by the prospect of receiving a new face.

  Often, it is the rest of us who need helping. ‘Societies aren’t good to people who don’t look ordinary,’ she says. In the past, Alex has worked with Changing Faces, a charity set up to end what it calls the ‘facial discrimination’ felt by people with disfigurements, a prejudice that is unthinkingly reinforced in popular culture where the villains are always the ones with scars. Changing Faces has opposed the panacea of facial transplants, believing that the onus should be on society to change its attitudes. The Royal College of Surgeons of England, too, was once against the idea, judging that the risk of biological rejection of the donated tissue was too high, but it has modified its position in the light of the Dinoire and other cases and psychological research, which seems to suggest that the ethical obstacles are not as great as had been supposed. It is now cautiously in favour of facial transplantation, while warning of the dangers of a boom in ‘disastrous’ operations by ‘inexperienced teams’, such as happened following the first successful heart transplants in the 1960s.

  The ethics of facial transplantation have no medical parallel. In a biomedical sense, a face transplant is no different from other transplants – all involve the replacement of diseased or damaged recipient tissue with healthy donor tissue. But there are some important, and not necessarily obvious, distinctions of context. The face is external on the body, normally highly visible, our usual means of human recognition. Along with the hands (once thought to be truer indicators of personal identity than faces because they cannot change their expression), our face is the most important representation of our self. Yet Alex tells me this is not a problem. ‘No element of identity accounts for squeamishness to do with the hands and face. It’s just the newness [of the surgical prospect].’