Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Yet the pleasures of the table – humankind’s legitimate recompense for being the only species to experience suffering, says Brillat – are too easily taken to excess. Even the French aren’t so fastidious about food that they can entirely avoid gratuitous overeating. Clerics are especially prone. Rabelais, in the fourth book of Pantagruel, attacks monks as men who profanely make a god of the belly. These ‘lazy, great-gulletted Gastrolaters’, as he calls them, worship the god Gaster and bring him offerings – Rabelais’s list runs to several lip-smacking pages of meat dishes, with several pages more given over to fish dishes that might be presented on fast days, when it was necessary to abstain from flesh. But Gaster is unimpressed with it all, and rudely points the idolaters to his lavatory, ‘there to ponder, meditate and reflect upon what godhead they found in his faeces’.

  Brillat-Savarin anticipated the problem of excess, and surprisingly includes in his book a very contemporary chapter on obesity. He’s not worried about himself: ‘I have always looked on my paunch as a redoubtable enemy; I have conquered it and limited its outlines to the purely majestic,’ he announces. (The Physiology was the work of a lifetime, and was published the year before Brillat died at the age of seventy, so it seems reasonable that he should have attained a certain girth.) But he is concerned about a group of people for whom he invents another new word, the ‘gastrophores’, those who, through excessive consumption of starch and sugar, lack of exercise and too much sleep, ‘lose their form and their original harmonious proportions’. Brillat-Savarin’s remedies spring obviously enough from his identification of these causes and still deserve consideration today. But if exercise and dietary self-discipline fail, he also has an ‘antifat belt’ to recommend, a restraint on the belly to be worn day and night. He warns against more extreme measures, such as the habit, then prevalent, of women drinking vinegar, telling the touching story of a girl he had known in his youth who wasted away from what we would now recognize as anorexia (the condition was named in the 1860s) and ultimately died in his arms. Thus, perhaps, did the happy marriage of the gourmand elude Jean Anthelme.

  A notorious modern landmark in French gustatory excess is the film La Grande Bouffe, in which, over the course of a weekend, and attended by a number of prostitutes, four middle-aged men gather in a secluded villa and resolve to eat themselves to death. One by one, they succeed. Fin. It’s the kind of film that gives European cinema a bad name in the Anglo-Saxon world, where any sort of carnal appetite is best ignored. La Grande Bouffe caused outrage when it was first shown, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, not so much because of its morbid stew of food, sex and death, but more for its Italian director, Marco Ferreri, who had dared to bring his satirical gaze to rest upon the central rite of French life.

  At one stage, the four men challenge one another to see who can eat the fastest, anticipating one of today’s odder public spectacles – extreme eating. In these modern contests, however, there is no art about the food, and no allegorical edifice of civilization to be demolished like a croquembouche. You just eat as much of one thing – peas, oysters, Mars bars, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches – as you can. According to the International Federation of Competitive Eating, the champions of this dubious activity are termed – and this at least would please Rabelais and Brillat – gurgitators. One Patrick Bertoletti holds records for eating the most key lime pie, pickles and pizza slices, as well as 275 jalapeño peppers in eight minutes. It is a surprise to discover that champion gurgitators are not all fat. Sonya Thomas weighs just 105 pounds but still ate forty-four Maine lobsters in twelve minutes. It takes physical preparation and training to succeed at the highest level. Medical assistance is on hand at the contests, but then, I realize, so it is at major sporting events. Anatomical examination of successful competitive eaters shows that they develop stomachs capable of stretching well beyond the usual limits. Other matters remain a mystery. In striking contrast to Ferreri’s film, the International Federation of Competitive Eating does not dwell on how its gurgitators void the excess they have consumed, for example. Consumption is encouraged, but its concomitant waste is politely denied. The phenomenon is growing in popularity, drawing television coverage and corporate sponsors, which include the expected food companies, but also Procter & Gamble, the maker of Pepto-Bismol. ‘Competitive eating’, though only just beginning to be studied by human psychologists, is an established term used by animal behaviourists. The terminology is a reminder that, quite aside from the public spectacle, these contests provide a grotesque epitome of nature’s contest for the survival of the fittest.

  In La Grande Bouffe, the last of the four men to go, Philippe (played by Philippe Noiret), feeds titbits to one of the dogs that have gathered in the garden of the house, looking forward to their own feast. ‘Be greedy,’ he advises the animals. ‘Eat too much. Always eat too much.’ His last act is to tuck in to a huge jelly in the shape of a pair of breasts, a symbolic return to his first ever meal. As Ferreri’s film and today’s eating contests each illustrate in their own uncompromising ways, the veil that the art of gastronomy draws over essential nourishment is as fragile as spun sugar.

  The Hand

  I want you to try this: hold up your left hand and pinch the thumb and forefinger to form an O. Then crook the remaining fingers at the middle knuckle, or what medical types in their helpful way call the proximal interphalangeal joint (the bones of the finger are called phalanxes). It is not especially easy. You will find you have an urge to bend the other joints too. But resist this (as much as you can), and instead hold your free fingers with their middle joints at as close to a right angle as you can manage and the other joints as straight as possible. This will feel a little odd. It is not a spontaneously adopted position, and it requires the use of certain muscles and not others in a way that is not usual.

  This is the exact pose that Doctor Tulp is holding in Rembrandt’s painting with which I began this book. Art historians and medical historians alike have examined the painting minutely, but they mostly pass over this detail. This is strange because it is clearly an important detail to the artist, who has placed tiny dabs of white paint on Tulp’s manicured fingernails so that they catch the light. The only other thing that catches the light in this way is the shiny pair of forceps which Tulp grips in his right hand. Most scholars have assumed that Tulp is merely waving his free hand in a rhetorical gesture. One, however, William Schupbach, has observed that Tulp holds his hand and fingers in this peculiar way in order to demonstrate the action of the very muscles that he is simultaneously lifting from the dissected arm in front of him. Rembrandt thus presents him dutifully executing both of his functions as praelector of the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild: he is both performing a dissection and giving a lesson about the workings of the human body. In a broadly humanist way, he is demonstrating the objective similarity of the dead and the living. We can presume that he is talking his attentive audience through what he is doing at the same time. In that case, notes Simon Schama, ‘Tulp is seen at the precise moment of demonstrating two of the unique attributes of man: utterance and prehensile flexibility.’ These, of course, make no humanistic point, but demonstrate rather man’s God-given uniqueness.

  When you bent your fingers a moment ago, you will have felt and perhaps seen a certain muscle contract in your forearm. This is the flexor digitorum superficialis, in other words the surface muscle that flexes the fingers. In the lower arm, it narrows and divides into four tendons that pass through the wrist. Each of these four tendons then forks in two when it reaches the end of its journey, and these pairs of tendon branches fasten to opposite sides of the middle joint of each finger. This bifurcation is an especially elegant piece of design as it allows for a second set of tendons, which run from a different flexor muscle, the flexor digitorum profundis, to pass through the gaps in order to operate the terminal joint on each finger. These eight tendons control the curling of the fingers like puppet strings. On the other side of the arm lie muscles called extensors from whic
h run further tendons that serve to straighten each finger. In addition to a general extensor, there are individual extensors for the forefinger and the little finger, which explains why your forefinger is more effective as a pointer than the longer second finger, and why we are apt to breach English tea-drinking etiquette by leaving our little finger sticking out rudely in the air while the other fingers grip the cup handle (a gesture that may stem from chivalric etiquette when it was better to display refinement by not grasping everything edible with a greedy fist). All in all, says J. E. Gordon in his brilliant book Structures, these tendons ‘run through the body in almost as complicated a way as the wires of an old-fashioned Victorian bell system’. The fingers themselves contain no muscles, and human dexterity is therefore achieved entirely through this marionette-like remote control. Rembrandt’s and Tulp’s opting to illustrate this aspect of the human anatomy allows them to make a revolutionary new point, the one shortly to be articulated in detail by René Descartes, that the body may be regarded as a kind of machine.

  We have seen that a number of falsifications surround the dissected hand in The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp. It may have been painted from a separate anatomical specimen, and not even belong to Adriaen Adriaenszoon, the man on the slab. And since no real dissection ever started with the hand, it is likely that the artist and his patron agreed to focus on the hand for reasons to do with the beauty of its intricate anatomy and its indication of the divine in the human. Oddest of all, though, is that the muscles and tendons that Tulp is holding cannot be from a left arm at all. They lead from the wrong side of the elbow. It seems that Rembrandt must have worked from a right arm, and then replicated what he drew like a decal over the left arm of Adriaenszoon. The puzzle remains as to why the praelector agreed to let this travesty of his own art of surgery be set down for ever on canvas. Perhaps he was more concerned with his own portrayal.

  Rembrandt’s brushstrokes nevertheless show a very beautiful dissection, done to a higher standard than any of the hands I saw in modern dissection rooms, and easily the equal of those I found preserved in anatomical collections. It fully lives up to the contemporary view of the hand as man’s noblest appendage. For Helkiah Crooke, writing ‘On the excellency of the hands’ in 1618, they are the ‘two wondrous weapons’ of man and no other animal. The hand is the ‘first instrument so it is the framer, yea and imployer of all other instruments. For not being formed for any one particular use it was capeable of all . . . By the helpe of the hand Lawes are written, Temples built for the service of the maker, Ships, houses, instruments, and all kind of weapons are formed.’

  This general versatility is the mark of the hand’s – and our own – superiority. It is not the specialized claw of less able creatures. Especially with the extension of tools, the hand is capable of all things. It becomes the physical analogue of our free-roving mind. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras believed that man was more intelligent than the beasts because of his hands. Aristotle, about a century later, believed roughly the opposite, that our hands only became necessary with intelligence. Either way, they were in agreement that manual dexterity and intelligence are closely connected. This remains the consensus today, although which came first is still hotly disputed.

  The apparently simple act of pointing with the index finger shows how closely bound up the use of the hand is with the development of other human abilities. Helkiah Crooke and others thought we were the only animal to use tools. This belief has been disproved by observations of chimpanzees and certain other species, which takes some of the edge off the historic case for the uniqueness of the human hand. However, we remain, so far as we know, the only creature that points. Pointing is a highly ‘unnatural’ action. To point at something presupposes that we have a mental label or name for what is being pointed at, or else the action would mean nothing. This in turn requires the existence not just of language but of a shared language and, moreover, our understanding that the person for whom we are pointing has a mind similar to our own, so that they can infer exactly what it is, of the many things that may lie in front of our finger, we are pointing at. According to the physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis, this makes pointing ‘a fundamental action of world-sharing, of making a world-in-common’.

  The pointing hand soon acquired a life of its own, known as an index, fist or ‘manicule’. Henry VIII drew his own finely inked pointing hand symbols in the margins of his books when he wished to be able to find certain passages again. Manicules were often beautifully drawn in highly individual styles, reinforcing the sense that they were not merely markers but heartfelt personal gestures. The pointing hand became one of the first clichés – clichés originally being the special symbols printers needed so often that it was worth casting a special piece of type for them. Regarded as a standard punctuation mark until the eighteenth century, the manicule was revived in the 1980s as the user-friendly cursor symbol on computer screens. Lone hands may point and perform other helpful duties, like Thing, the severed hand-servant in the Addams Family cartoons, who lights Gomez’s cigars. But they also point fatefully at us, like the evil glove of the Blue Meanies in the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, the airborne hand of the UK National Lottery ‘It could be you’ advertisements and the commanding fingers of General Kitchener and Uncle Sam in posters from the First World War.

  Pointing is just one of a huge vocabulary of gestures of which the hand is capable. Indeed, it has been estimated that there are more possible hand gestures than there are words in the English language. The Hand of God does not only point, but also extends two fingers together (in blessing) and offers an open palm (spreading beneficence upon the earth). In 1644, John Bulwer, a man so obsessed with hands that he named his adopted daughter Chirothea (Hand of God), published Chironomia and Chirologia, an exhaustive catalogue of human gestures. Bulwer believed that gesture was based on ‘universal reason’, which was independent of language, and might be adopted as a kind of silent esperanto. He offers some insightful explanations for familiar gestures, such as:

  TO WRING THE HANDS is a naturall expression of excessive griefe, used by those who condole, bewaile, and lament. Of which Gesture that elegant Expositour of Nature hath assign’d this reason. Sorrow which diminisheth the body it affects, provokes by wringing of the minde, tears, the sad expressions of the eyes; which are produced and caused by the contraction of the spirits of the Braine, which contraction doth straine together the moisture of the Braine, constraining thereby tears into the eyes; from which compression of the Braine proceeds the HARD WRINGING OF THE HANDS, which is a Gesture of expression of moisture.

  The length of his descriptions in these volumes lends some force to his argument in favour of a language based on gesture rather than words. It is a relief as well as a pleasure to turn to the tiny engravings, arranged in grids of twenty-four on a page, of hands upraised, drooping, clenched, outspread, drumming, stroking, clasping and waving, each with its own immediate expressive power.

  Bulwer is stronger on gestures of devotion than he is on gestures of vulgar abuse, but many of the latter go back even further in history. In his play The Clouds, Aristophanes gives a stage direction for Strepsiades to give Socrates ‘the finger’ when Socrates asks him a question about beating out a rhythm. ‘Why it’s tapping time with this finger,’ Strepsiades answers. ‘Of course when I was a boy,’ he adds, now raising his phallus, ‘I used to make rhythm with this one.’ The phallic connotation of the finger is unmistakable, and it would be no surprise to find that it extends back well before the ancient Greeks. Other gestures have largely escaped their obvious vulgar connotations. Both the upraised thumb and the ‘okay’ gesture of forefinger and thumb closed in a circle are positive signs for most of us, although in Greece and Brazil respectively they remain unspeakably offensive.

  The origins of the British equivalent of the ‘finger’, the V sign, are more mysterious. One story is that English longbowmen, captured during the Hundred Years’ War with France, would have their first
two fingers – the ones that guide the flight of the arrow – cut off so that they would be useless when they returned to the battlefield. Bowmen who had never been captured would therefore wave their intact fingers at the enemy as a gesture of defiance. A V sign also makes an appearance in the elaborate armoury of hand signals described by Rabelais in an absurd duel in Pantagruel. The English Thaumast has come to Paris to learn from the wise giant Pantagruel, whereupon Pantagruel’s mischievous companion Panurge waylays him with a gestural battle of wits. It is Panurge and not the Englishman who makes the V sign, though. So inventive and silly are the gestures that Rabelais describes that it is impossible to be sure whether this V sign has any particular meaning. Like Bulwer, Rabelais is keen to suggest the communicative power of hand signals, but he ends up demonstrating mainly that it is the coarsest gestures that are the most widely understood.

  The most important way in which our hands have informed our intelligence is by giving us a readymade numbering system. The Roman numerals I, II, III and IIII may be based on the upheld fingers, with the symbol for five, V, based on the shape made by the thumb and the forefinger when the whole hand is held up. So-called ‘denary’ counting is based on the ten fingers and thumbs, and most other popular number bases, such as binary and bases four, twelve and twenty, are based on various combinations of limbs and digits. Even an octal system used by some Native American cultures begins with the hands: it counts not the peaks that our fingers make but the valleys in between them.