The Anatomy Lesson

by Nina Siegal

  The human hand, honorable gentlemen: the human arm. Wherefore is it God’s gift? I dare not attempt the answer now, for this question deserves our profoundest consideration. Although this year’s lecture shall explore many parts of the human body, the highlight of my presentation, I assure you, gentlemen, will be my discussion of the human arm and hand. I shall offer a demonstration of the mechanistic operation of the human arm, its major muscle groups, arteries, veins, and tendons—a subject which is particularly dear to my heart.

  We shall begin, however, by cutting round with the surgeon’s blade, to remove the skin.

  Before I begin, let me make two apologies. First, especially for those standing in the back, I regret that our current chambers are not adequate. The Surgeons’ Guild spent many months searching Amsterdam for new headquarters, and I’m pleased to announce that the governors have now decided to build an expansive new theatrum anatomicum right here in Sint Anthoniespoort. It shall be located in a large-bellied room in the new steeple currently under construction, and it shall accommodate twice as many spectators as our present chambers. At least, I hope, the close proximity among bodies shall keep some of you warm!

  Secondly, as is the nature of all things corporeal, our patient, the focus of our attention tonight, shall inevitably begin its natural process of decay. That process, unfortunately, shall produce an unpleasant putrescence. As you perhaps have noted already, the many candelabras that hang above you to light the chamber are filled with scented oils and the censers burn with incense that should aid the olfactory experience.

  You may have a particular sensitivity to putrescence. In which case, please position yourself closer to one of the small windows in the tower. As required by the Surgeons’ Decree on the Anatomy Issue of 1606, I do ask that you attempt to maintain your seat throughout the proceeding. However, if you feel yourself becoming faint, may I suggest that you avert your gaze toward the anatomical text that you have brought with you or, if you have none, gaze at your hands or feet and contemplate my words rather than the patient.

  However, if this doth not suffice and you find yourself overcome, raise your hand to notify our anatomical assistant—please step forward, Jan, so that our audience may know you—and he shall escort you out of the hall. There are chamber pots downstairs of which you may avail yourself. Once you have left the theatrum anatomicum, unfortunately, you shall not be able to return until the next evening’s lesson.

  In reverence to the tradition of anatomical lessons established by our worthy counterparts in Padua and Bologna, our discussion shall begin with a quodlibet, consisting of my lecture and recitation from the anatomical text. It shall be followed by a disputatio, in which members of the audience shall be permitted to submit questions and engage in debate about the material at hand. However, these comments must be respectful of the serious nature of the proceedings. Members of the audience should refrain from laughing or talking—or, indeed, applauding—during the lecture.

  As per guild decree, I will pass around the auditorium various human organs that shall be dissected from the anatomical subject, so that you may inspect them at a closer vantage. They will be quite bloody, and though I will ask my famulus anatomicus to rinse them before we pass them around the audience, I must warn you that there will still be something of a mess. Please handle these organs carefully, observe them briefly, and pass them along to the person seated beside you. Should a member of the audience be caught attempting to abscond with the heart, kidney, liver, or any other organ, that person shall be fined six guilders and removed from the theater at once.

  You laugh, gentlemen, but such attempts are not unknown.

  Every year there is at least one foolish soul who seeks to leave with a souvenir. Last year, a young burgher put a liver into the pocket of his cloak. Had not the blood and black bile of this organ seeped through the lining, we would not have discovered the theft. Let this year be the year that we reverse this trend. These organs would be reunited with the rest of the body for a proper Christian burial.

  Now, then, I shall begin by removing this sheet over the patient. If you know yourself to be squeamish, please take a breath now, and breathe deeply for several moments. For the sight of the patient and its deathly pallor may be disquieting. I should prepare you, too, for the fact that this particular patient may prove even more unsightly than our usual fare, for his body is marred by the many markings of so many executioners’ whips, chains, and branding scars. These, friends, are but the outward manifestation of his sinful path.

  A final caveat: the right hand of this patient was amputated just above the wrist. This shall not hinder our discussion of his limbs, as we shall simply use the left arm, instead. However, it may prove disquieting to those of you who have never seen an unwhole human form.

  Those of you who have brought along anatomical texts should be able to follow along with the demonstration quite easily. I shall be using two different texts to guide my instruction. The first is De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius. Jan, please bring the text to me now. The useful illustration may be found on page two hundred and twenty-three.

  I have removed the cloth. I shall take a moment to allow you all to view the body whole before I cut around with my surgeon’s blade.

  Tonight, I shall begin the anatomical lecture with a dissection of the patient’s abdominal cavity, discussing all the major bodily organs. Then, following Vesalius, I will focus on the structure and function of the man’s hand.

  You shall see plainly that God has left his footprints here, within the body of this thief. Whence I begin to dissect the flesh and reveal those footprints, I ask you to think not only upon the appearance of the man, the shape or texture of the organs, but on the functioning of man’s soul. We must give ocular testimony but search, too, with our souls. Observe!

  When I entered the anatomy theater through the side door, I was treated to such a strange sight. Dr. Tulp was holding in his hands what struck me as the head of a monkey or a small sea monster. It had no limbs, save the few cut tubes that ran out of its core. It had no eyes and no mouth, but a large indentation where its ears might have been.

  He stood there holding it out to the audience in supplication. The room of men, all clad in black and white, seemed to me to be one man, whose single mouth was agape and whose eyes were fixed on the object before him. My gaze returned to Tulp, who stood at the center of the theater like the convener of a male coven.

  Of course, I knew why I’d come here, and I knew the event was an anatomy. But some combination of the wind and the snow and the thoughts in my head had distorted my cognition, so everything I witnessed pointed to something else.

  Before the praelector was the body on the dissection table, though my mind registered it as a slain and quartered ox. It didn’t immediately occur to me that the objects scattered about the stage were human organs. I saw them as curios from my kunstkamer: a dried snake, reef corals, a tortoise shell.

  When the chamber door slammed behind me, all eyes turned in my direction, and my own awareness fell upon myself. I looked down and saw that I was quite a spectacle, as my cloak and shoes, my breeches, and even my hands were enveloped in white. I stamped off the snow and stood for a moment as the powder quickly turned into puddles. I bowed as deeply as I could.

  For a moment, everyone was silent. I announced very clearly, “Sirs, I do apologize with all my heart.” It seemed the entire congregation laughed at that moment. And in the sudden recognition that I had punned, I was able to reorder the elements of this picture to make better sense.

  I had walked into the anatomy lesson so late that Tulp had already opened the chest cavity and was currently cupping Adriaen’s bloody heart in his hands. A whole series of emotions rushed through me then, a confused tangle of feelings of pity and grief and a little bit of righteousness and ultimately powerlessness. I had left him on that table this afternoon, and I knew it would come to this, did I not?

  Tulp stopped the proceedings and, with utter civi
lity in spite of my tardiness, introduced me to his audience in glowing terms. I felt my whole body redden in mortification. Once I had spent what seemed like an endless amount of time receiving this unwarranted approbation, he told me where to take my seat. My eyes adjusted to the light and my mind took in the reality.

  He was holding Adriaen’s heart in his very hands, dispassionately explaining the structures and functions as if it were no different from the heart of a rabbit or a dog. His speech was appropriately dry and scholastic, but it was difficult for me to keep my eyes off the table where the body lay undressed, his chest cavity torn asunder, his organs laid bare, blood splattered about everywhere.

  The memories so recently revived could not be reconciled with this picture painted before me in the present. Adriaen was cold and hungry when I’d seen him last in life. He’d been a bit dizzied by drink but he was nonetheless a man of vitality. I’d seen him in the tomb below earlier in the day, but even then he’d looked like a full man.

  Tulp continued lecturing, speaking with theatricality and pomp that overstated his case. The words swept over me, though, for I wasn’t in any mood to hear about physiognomy. I didn’t realize Adriaen’s heart was being passed around the audience until my neighbor nudged me and deposited it in my hands. I had no time to reject the offer, and though I would not have taken it if I’d been given the choice, I did not give it back. It was a bit like having an infant thrust into your hands, so small and fragile, so oddly weightless.

  To my surprise, though, it was cold as a seashell and hard as one, too. From a distance, I had imagined it warm and supple, full of the enriching blood of life. But it was clear that life had long since fled from this organ, in spite of all the blood.

  Turning it several times, I found myself quickly spellbound by what holding it implied. I kept turning the organ over and over in my palms, feeling the way that its brittle texture felt against the moist, pliant flesh of my flesh. What could I learn from it, from holding it? What meaning could I divine?

  Finally, someone tapped me on my shoulder and told me I had better pass it along. Others wished to see. I looked up, as if awakened from a dream, and handed it to the man sitting next to me. It was a muscle, I thought then, and its function was bodily, not oracular. No soul resided there anymore.

  I looked around the room and saw some of the men who’d come to the studio to sit for my painting: the surgeon Adriaen Slabbraen, seated just at the edge of the dissection platform, craning over the railing to read Tulp’s open copy of Vesalius’s Fabrica, the apprentice Hartman Hartmanszoon standing up in the back row, holding his own copy of what seemed to be an illustrated anatomy book he’d brought along. Jacob Colevelt, the new guild member, was sitting all the way to the left of the dissection platform, his chin tucked down in a way that suggested he just might vomit. Van Loenen seemed to be contemplating something very profound.

  I saw the consternation in the eyes of one guild member, the slight fear in the gaze of another, and the naive awe in the expression of a third. Living man’s response to death, displayed there on the table before him, I thought, is not revealed through just one type of expression. This led me to thinking perhaps I could include this dynamic in the painting, each man reacting to the unfolding mortality play before him, each one taking it in in his own way.

  Although I could no longer save Adriaen, perhaps I could give his body form in the painting, give his death some kind of reality, restoring, at the very least, a sense that he was a human man and not just a corpse. It was as I was contemplating all this that there was that terrible commotion outside the theater, and the door burst open and the crowd pushed its way in. What chaos in such an austere setting! What excitement! What a thrill. Of course you saw the woman who flew across the room and threw herself across the body of the dead man.

  It was you, wasn’t it, Monsieur Descartes, who’d tapped me on the shoulder to pass along the heart?

  That were not a doctor’s room. It were a butcher’s hall. Adriaen lay naked with their knives and cleavers and clamps. I saw them weapons stabbed into the wood around him on the table. I saw his body cleaved open and his heart in some man’s hands.

  It were the force of that crowd that got us in that door. They pushed and pressed and pounded until the latch came loose and the locks did bend. I do not think they loved me but they loved the chance to try to save Adriaen. The kid. He were theirs now. His life were already some kind of lore.

  We got in but it did not help. Them medical men and magistrates were no kinder to me than them who threw cobblestones, them who pelted. They showed no pity. They threw us all out and blockaded the door. They grabbed me on the belly, never mind about the babe. I screamed bloody murder but they did not stop, they did not bend. They tore me away from him and thrust us out of the room. They pushed the men back, the women back, the crowds. All of us were the same to them. We were all one man.

  They shushed me with their gentlemanly ways. “He’ll serve scholarship,” they said. “He serves medicine.” They said, “He’s serving God.” That’s what they said, but all I saw were Adriaen, and no hope of salvation in that room.

  Anyway it were too late. His body were open, his heart torn out. I were too late. I were too late to the hanging. I were too late to the magistrate. I were too late to that room.

  I wept. I wept so hard I thought the babe would come out of my mouth. I were doubled over by the door, crying, weeping, but I would not convince them. It were too late. The only one who came were that Jan Fetchet. He took us some bread and ale from the surgeons’ feast and told us to get warm and to rest.

  “Sit, then. Take a seat here,” he said. “Do not cry, for that there is not your Adriaen. He has long slipped his earthly noose. He never dwelt within that chamber, never felt the surgeon’s blade. His body quit at noon; his spirit fled at two.”

  We sat and listened, because there were nothing else we could do. Fetchet sat with us and thought. After a while, he said, “His body is not, perhaps, his final fate. I have an idea. I will take you to the home of that artist, Harmenszoon van Rijn. He can give you what I cannot—the body’s last part.”

  I kept wandering from town to town, until I ended up back in the town I dreaded most, Leiden, my birthplace. The thought of returning home and seeing my father so repelled me that I spent a good many nights inside the town tavern, where I knew he’d never go. Some of the old guzzlers there remembered me from my youth, though the contours of my face were much changed, and they kept me well in cups. On the third or fourth night, I met there a man who recognized me from my father’s workshop, and he walked up next to me and put a grave hand on my shoulder.

  “Forgive me for not saying this in a more apt setting, but I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said.

  At first, I knew not his meaning, and I said, “Why, I’ve none to lose and therefore mourn not!”

  The man’s brow creased so woefully that I felt immediately penitent for my mirth. “Was your gentle father, that good and pious, none to you at all? Then his death falls very hard, indeed.”

  I gulped down the swig of beer. “Death, you say?” I dropped my cup. “My father dead?” I cried out. Little did I know that this would touch me thus. I cried out in agony and clutched the man who’d given me the news.

  “Why, son, you didn’t know? But he only died this week. Were you not here?”

  I cried out again, and grabbed the man tighter in my rage. “You lie!” I said. “You lie! Your lips are the devil’s own! Your tongue should be cut out!”

  I didn’t know it as I cried out, but in my rage and despair, I hit the man, my father’s friend, and bloodied his nose. The tavern keeper parted him from me, and the other guzzlers leaped upon me. Still I tried to beat the man who’d talked with me, and the guzzlers put their fists upon me and threw me off my stool. As I cried out that the man was a liar, they pummeled me until I was no more alive than the sand on the tavern floor.

  The other man they took directly to the town physician, and the
y rolled me out of the tavern door like a barrel. They left me there as a doormat, and I stayed and let them step on me even as the dawn came and they closed up shop and left.

  This unfortunate affair did nonetheless lead to what was, in my adult life, the single brief respite from my ordeal. For, Flora, the miller’s daughter I described at the start of my tale, learned of my beating, collected me from the base of the tavern steps, and brought me to her home to nurse me back to health.

  No wench was ever kinder to a man. No gift that was ever given was as precious as this. While my wounds were new, I lived like a burgomaster under Flora’s care. She poulticed me and fed me. She softly petted my brow and kissed me gently about my face. She never asked me once to account for the years that I had been gone; she told me stories about the mill and about her parents—now both passed on as well. One day, she pulled out from under her bed a tight roll of leather that she placed in my hands. Within, I found my father’s set of leatherworking tools she’d managed to save from our shop the day I’d fled from Leiden as a youth, and before the tax collector bolted our doors. I was nearly overcome with tears.

  No woman—no one at all, as far as I can recall—ever showed me the face of grace. She was my mother, my sister, and my darling wife all at once. Flora alone knew my sorrow and anger over my father’s death, and she swore to the townsfolk on my behalf that I had not meant to hurt my father’s friend at the tavern, but only lashed out in the torment of my grief. On her good word—for she was beloved now in Leiden—other townsfolk provided for me, too: a new set of clothes to replace my vagabond’s gray rags; a hand-carved walking cane to aid me as my ankle, broken in my attack, did mend; even a fancy cap to wear upon my head. I swear I would’ve become another man altogether, if I’d stayed with Flora for even a week more.

  But when I was fully mended, she sent me out from under her roof, saying, “Alms to you is sin now that you are strong and well.” She shooed me off with the broom, too, laughing so her bosom quavered. “Find work and return to me with a plump goose to roast on Sint Bonaventure’s Day.”