Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  These drawings, and the others that Rymsdyk would make for William Hunter over the next two decades—not all of those in the Anatomy were by Rymsdyk’s hand but most were—are extraordinary. In these first pictures, while the woman is reduced to meaty torso, her upper body invisible or removed, the severed ends of her thigh bones visible where her legs have been sawn off, the baby is both whole and beautiful. It might be sleeping there, this child, waiting ready for the moment of that birth which has been forever put off. Its hair, where at the nape it curls, is detailed by Rymsdyk’s pencil strand by strand, the neck itself a tightly folded shrug the sight of which brings back to me with an immediacy of detail the memory of my own daughter at birth, the firmness of her skin, the unexpected solidity she had like a well-packed parcel and the way she smelt, of biscuits and sweet tea. The baby’s ear is flattened slightly, misshapen by long confinement as the ears of newborns often are; the fingers of its right hand curl up about its face which is hidden from us, turned in towards its mother’s body as it would have done, held in her arms, in life. The other arm, stretched out, lies along the rounded body pointing up to where, beneath the lost rafters of its mother’s ribs, the baby’s feet lie, folded; and I can neither bear the sight of it nor turn away because in all these things I see the way that living children lie, their unconscious assumptions of protection and their trust, the way they turn towards us, sturdy bodies lying nested into half-crooked arms, and it is easy to suppose these things come into being with our sight of them and so to think ourselves responsible, deserving of credit—that it is our actions after birth that call faith forth, a child’s reaction to the specificities of ourselves, our care and kindness—but the truth is that these things predate our meeting. Love exists regardless of ourselves and is unearned or got on credit, these gestures echoing those already made and made again, the child inside me turning over as I go about my business unaware, the only power that we are given to maintain or to destroy; and this is why it is such agony to hold a sleeping child: the certainty it brings us that trust is a gift, fragile like an egg in certain places, and so we must be careful with it, holding it in our outstretched hands and trying to make of them a shape that it will fit. All these things are present in Rymsdyk’s drawing not as sentimentality or sympathy but only as a clear-eyed fidelity, an accuracy of line and tone: the reproduction of nothing more than what was seen.

  Although it was William Hunter who claimed ownership of the work done in the Covent Garden dissecting room, it was John’s life which fascinated me, his obsession with anatomy, the collection that he built throughout his life of specimens, as well as his reformation of the surgeon’s craft which was effected through a kind of iron-willed iconoclasm: he had little interest in publishing his work, disdaining that which was taken on trust and considering what was written down secondary to what was seen, but only set about his business in the way he thought it should be done until at last the world began to follow him. Looking at the pictures from Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus now, though, it is neither John nor William that I think of but the artist, Jan van Rymsdyk, standing with his chalk box at John’s shoulder, his fingers stiffened by the cold, trying to keep the edges of his paper clean while in the corner of the room the discarded parts of already rotting human bodies lay in piles. Beyond his work as a medical illustrator little of the detail of Rymsdyk’s life remains. He was born in the Netherlands but the place and the year are lost, as is the date of his arrival in England or what he did on reaching it, where he lived in London, or the manner of his life between the winter mornings hunched in the dissecting room. It is possible that William Hunter gave him lodging in order that he would be readily available when his skills were needed, time being critical to the examination of the body’s fine structures, its vessels and membranes that start to deteriorate as soon as death occurs; certainly John would go on to make such arrangements with other artists. What is clear is that Rymsdyk was not happy with the kind of work that he was doing. He had ambitions: a portrait artist, perhaps. A recorder of the living. Anything beyond these chilly rooms, this stink. In 1758, eight years after he made his first drawing for William Hunter, Rymsdyk left London for Bristol, where he was determined to set himself up as portraitist; but he was not a success. He took lodgings for himself and his young son, Andrew, whose mother is another blank face at the periphery of the remembered or recorded, and he placed advertisements, trying to position himself as far as possible from his surgical labours, but little work came, and what did retained a tinge of the mortuary: he painted the portrait of the surgeon William Barrett who had hoped, perhaps, by paying for this service to access Rymsdyk’s greater talent; but on that score he was refused. Failing to find work he considered acceptable Rymsdyk was reduced to painting inn signs, funding by that means a moderate drunkenness and a life that was considered squalid even in such squalid times, relying for the rest on Barrett’s petty charities—occasional meals, the passing on of cast-off clothes—until at last, in 1764, he accepted defeat and returned to London. There, resentful, he went back to the work that he had left behind, beginning again after such an ignoble hiatus on illustrations for William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus and working in addition with John, who, himself recently returned to London from a stint as an army surgeon in Portugal and trying now to build his own reputation aside from his brother, had entered into partnership with a dentist and was spending his spare time trying to graft human teeth onto the heads of cockerels. Rymsdyk continued this work for another six years, but something must have altered in him on his return to London from Bristol—some sting, perhaps, of humiliation which he turned to determination—because he did not return to the impecuniousness of his West Country life but saved his money until he had enough to begin on what he had begun to think of as his own great work: in 1772 he applied to the British Museum for permission, with his son Andrew, to draw their exhibits, making from them an encyclopaedia of his own, Museum Britannicum, which was published at last in 1778. In the preface he allows himself finally to vent a lifetime’s frustration, the resentments of a man who feels his skills to be unrecognised, uncredited, taken advantage of, who considered William Hunter to have manipulated him, persuading him out of a respectable career in order that he should continue to prostitute his skills on corpses—but thinking of Rymsdyk it is this image that comes most clearly to me: the reflection of a dissection-room window, its cold clear light, striations around it as in rippled water, caught on the membrane stretched across a five-month-old foetus’ bent head, the uterine home of this almost-child removed and placed upon a wooden table; and this drawn, just as it was seen, by a man whose talent lay precisely in this—the reproduction of the surface of things. This is the mean tragedy I imagine for Jan van Rymsdyk: not that of skill wasted nor diverted so much as a skill half-made, an artist incapable of artifice. Seeing, he was capable only of reproduction, eye to hand: the surface of things stretched across his paper, each fold of skin, each hair, the shadow on a cheek, a fingernail, an eyelid closed. In his drawings of William Hunter’s specimens this is enough, or it is already too much—the viewer can do the rest, the very fact of the subject’s existence exciting pathos; but given a living subject, one less arousing of compassionate terror, I imagine Rymsdyk’s work as unresounding, the dull thud of a language spoken without understanding. His subjects would be, on canvas, no more than themselves, and perhaps not even that: Rymsdyk could add no character, could inflect his subject with neither meaning nor significance beyond that which they manifested themselves. The world, for him, was nothing but what was, his talent in its reproduction; and from his intimation of this lack, his awareness of something missing without any conception of what it was, his bitterness rose.

  * * *

  —

  Finding out that I was pregnant after months of disappointment tinged with unnameable relief, I sat down and cried and couldn’t say why. Johannes sat next to me, uncertain but not unsympathetic. Expecting to feel joy or at least an end to the a
nxiety of small plastic strips in silent bathrooms and the hurriedly suppressed disappointment on Johannes’ face I felt instead something that was closer to grief: a kind of fracture, the past lost and the future suddenly made opaque, certainty of habit or routine removed. It was not a surprise but still it felt a shock, and all evening I stayed where I was, curled up beneath a blanket on the sofa leaking tears while Johannes sat next to me, worried and quiet. I clung to him and tried to remember that I was not alone without yet understanding the full import of it: that aloneness now was in the past, and that I might come to long for it, the stillness of a body unkicked, from inside or out.

  The next morning I rang the doctor’s surgery but

  —Can you tell me the reason for your appointment?

  found myself unable to say the words. It seemed still too much of a presumption to place myself among the ranks of the pregnant with their unlearned competencies, their experiences that I lacked. Later, sitting in the surgery listening to the doctor’s well-rehearsed speech, which was delivered to the empty space above my left ear while one of his hands fiddled with his computer mouse, the dancing cursor wishing me gone, I waited for the moment that he would call me out and demand proof, but it seemed that my honesty was assumed—and after all why would I lie. He said

  —Take paracetamol for your headaches.

  —I don’t get headaches any more.

  —You might now. How are you feeling otherwise?

  —A little tired—

  although really I had no idea how I felt and nor did I have any gauge against which I could measure what was normal. There would be mornings, soon, when I would lie on the bathroom floor, too tired to move except when another swell of nausea came and forced me up over the toilet bowl to retch emptily; and still, then, I wouldn’t know whether this was within the parameters of the ordinary and anyway what could be done about it but endure. The doctor shrugged a little and turned away.

  —If you have any pain or bleeding go to A & E,

  and so began the slow dividing up of time: two thirds of a year split into months, and months split into weeks and days, each one counted off as though it were a sentence to be passed and at the end of it recalibration, a return to an old life with new circumstances like a house that has been gutted and rebuilt. Walking out of the doctor’s surgery, my place within the system confirmed, my status acknowledged, clutching a sheaf of leaflets on birth options, hospital choices, the risks associated with shellfish, coffee, cheese, I looked at other women sideways, wondering. I sat on the bus and felt myself to be an imposter in both worlds: no longer singular but not yet past the point at which I could consider myself to be what other pregnant women were—and even after birth, that ten-hour lesson in topography during which I heard myself call out but couldn’t understand the words, I felt that I had not quite done things properly and that my own experience lacked, in some way, that element necessary to transform it into knowledge: that it remained not the thing itself but only a picture of it, so that I was not quite yet a mother. Placental failure and my own rising blood pressure had forced us to tip our daughter early outwards and, lacking the benefit of properly delivered nutrition and those last few consolidating weeks, she was at birth a half-size model of herself, her blueish skin stretched tight across her skull, the line of her vertebrae showing along her back like threaded pearls beneath a cotton sheet. She lay near weightless in my arms, her eyelids falling across her steady gaze, and I was almost afraid to touch her. Home from the hospital, crying again, I had to ask Johannes to pick her up and put her down, to change her clothes, to hand her to me to feed because I was too frightened of the feel of her; and so we began to count again, not down this time but up, back through days and weeks to months, and still that joy I had been promised didn’t come. I waited, patiently, through all the dark extended hours for the instant of my own remaking when at last I would feel the things I ought: certainty, transparency, delight; but it didn’t come. Instead there was only something complicated that I didn’t have a name for, quite—a shifting landscape of duty and fear, the gnawing, restless anxiety that started when I was in a different room from my daughter and the exhausted relief when she was calm and slept; the growing realisation that I would always now be pulled in two directions and that I would be filled with the compulsion to protect, which meant that even when I felt I couldn’t bear another minute of it I pulled myself up in bed and reached out in darkness for the crying child; and it baffles me now that I couldn’t see how all this added up to love. I can’t remember quite when it was that shock subsided and I came at last to understand that what I had taken for a temporary loss of balance was only how things always would be, this tangle of broken sleep and piles of washing left on chairs the sum total of motherhood’s difference so that I must come to terms, and find a way to live in tiny interludes—except that it had, I think, something to do with routine: this new life laid down in daily patterns, a structure ossified by repetition until I could barely remember what it had been like before and so could not compare; and even then I could not say for certain that I was happy but only that the thought of things being otherwise was unbearable—

  but all this was to come. For those first few weeks of pregnancy, as slowly sickness became coextensive with consciousness, and exhaustion accrued mass until it was so solid that I could make no dent in it, I felt, in place of the anticipated joy, only a tiny, private sense of loss, and, beyond that—as I went about the necessary administration, the choosing of a hospital, the midwife’s booking-in appointment, as I provided urine samples and had my blood drawn into vials—an overarching disbelief that despite all evidence to the contrary I would, at the end of it, have a child.

  * * *

  —

  On 21 December 1767, seventeen years after he had performed the dissection of a pregnant woman while his brother William watched and the artist Jan van Rymsdyk sketched, John Hunter again stood beside a woman’s body, this one alive, albeit not for much longer, and with a name: Martha Rhodes. She was twenty-three years old, less than five feet tall and with a pelvis that was contorted to such a degree it was making the delivery of the child that she was carrying impossible. She had gone into labour the day before and the midwife, unable to provide any relief, had called for Henry Thomson, a surgeon at the London Hospital; he in turn had called for John Hunter to assist him in attempting to perform a Caesarean section. Although of the three who had been present at the Covent Garden dissection it was William who had become the obstetrician, still it was John who had the reputation for skill and for experiment; besides which, William had ascended smoothly to that strata of society he had always looked to join and was now physician to Queen Charlotte—he would not come here, to this house in Rose and Crown Court off Shoe Lane, one of those narrow alleys that lead upwards from Fleet Street, away from the river. There were others present, too, besides Henry Thompson and John: a gaggle of men, physicians and surgeons, gathered like jostling birds around the table on which Martha lay, her head resting on a pillow and her legs hanging down. None of them had performed this operation before and nor had they seen it done. It was curiosity which brought them up the twisting staircase, the anticipation of something extraordinary done before them, and I imagine that there would have been amongst them a carnival atmosphere, an excitement close to joy, hands shaken firmly to greet each new arrival, shoulders clasped, as two and a half centuries later another group would gather to wait for the results of the Huygens probe, those first pictures of a strange moon, or as the crowds on the Boulevard des Capucines would wait in line all afternoon, wrapped up against the cold, to watch an infant Andrée Lumiere pat the surface of a goldfish bowl: this expectation of a line pushed back and something beyond it grasped, knowledge delivered into light and them as witnesses. Martha’s terror I cannot imagine. Thomson said she consented to the operation “cheerfully” but it seems hard to believe. Perhaps he mistook exhaustion for fortitude, the desperation to h
ave suffering ended by any means for equanimity at the prospect of the route proposed—and I remember how, late on in labour when it seemed that everything had been this way for as long as I could remember and that there would never be an end to it, unknown people came and went about me, obstetricians, midwives, anaesthetists, and I grabbed at any hand that I could reach and begged. Martha must have known for months how things would be; hoped, perhaps, that the baby would be small so that they both might have the ordinary chances, death a risk but not a certainty, this portion of hope making the whole seem possible; and I wonder if she lay awake through long, uncomfortable nights while the baby kicked against her tangled vertebrae weighing her child’s life against her own, her mind ticking through all possible outcomes until, her body having shown no sign of offering reprieve, all that was left to her was this table, these men, the dose of opium that they gave her. There are times when pregnancy seems like the narrowing down of options to a point, and still it is impossible to make oneself believe, quite, that there is no way out of it but this: a bed somewhere, a costing up of risks and this pain that tears you from yourself, your mind disbursed by it, your body made an exit wound. Even now, when what I wait for is a path that has been mapped, its route no longer trod in darkness but seen and softened, when there are epidurals, ultrasound, the surgeon’s manifold experience, my body imaged, patterned, known—even now I am terrified.