Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body Read Free

these ideas more than it cares to admit. Take blood. Old taboos still echo through the questionnaires one must complete in order to give blood, with their strange hints at tribal purity. Our feelings about organ donation, too, are coloured by deep cultural prejudice. If donors or their kin place restrictions on the organs that may be harvested, they are most likely to be on the heart and the eyes, based on the belief that the heart is the essential core of the person and the eyes are the window into the soul.
    The arts can tell us things about our body that medicine and biology do not. The head is an important part, so much so that it can stand for the whole body, as we see in the sculptor’s bust or your own passport photograph. But what happens when the nose alone stands for the head? In Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Nose’, a man’s nose detaches itself from his face and goes off on its own around St Petersburg, pursued by its nasally challenged owner. Importantly for the satirical bite of the tale, the nose takes on the man’s social pretensions. The story raises questions about the way in which certain parts of the body constitute our personal identity and others do not. But most of all it reminds us that the body and its parts are funny, if not ridiculous – or at least our constant self-awareness makes them so.
    Separated from their bodies, organs and parts sometimes multiply in alarming ways, gaining strange powers as they do so. In Gargantua and Pantagruel , Rabelais imagines a wall of vulvas protecting the city of Paris. ‘I have noticed that, in this town, the thingummybobs of women are cheaper than stone,’ observes Pantagruel’s companion Panurge. ‘You should build walls of them, arranging them with good architectural symmetry, putting the biggest ones in the front ranks, then sloping them back upwards like the spine of a donkey, making ranks of the medium ones next and finally of the smallest.’ A portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted towards the end of her reign around 1600 shows her wearing a dress covered with appliqué eyes and ears, emblematic of the all-knowing state of which she, of course, was the head. The artist Marcus Harvey caused uproar when he created a vast painting of the child-murderer Myra Hindley using children’s handprints as individual pixels. The work adapted a photograph of Hindley much reproduced in the newspapers at the time of her trial. Was there evil in that face? Is there good in a child’s hand? What did it mean to bring the two together?
    This book is about our bodies, their parts, and their multiple meanings. It is also about where we draw the limits of the body, and how we are always seeking to extend those limits, never more so than right now. For ‘extend’, I should perhaps write ‘redraw’, for although we like to think of ourselves as constantly extending the human frontier, the fact is that from time to time we choose tactical withdrawal. We draw the limits closer in, not further out. We think we like the idea of being all-capable, but in fact we’d rather not test our capacity for pain, or even make much use of our senses of smell and touch, for example. We think we’d like to live longer – or is it just that we’d prefer to avoid dying? We dream of escaping our bodies and existing in transformed or dematerialized ways. We may think these dreams are the product of recent or promised advances in biomedical technology. But in fact they are the timeless product of our imagination.
    Overarching this part-by-part progress, then, is another idea: the idea of the body as geography, as territory to be discovered, explored and conquered. This powerful metaphor is found throughout human culture, from the plays of Shakespeare to the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage , in which miniaturized humans journey through a man’s body in a quest to save his life. It also seems to reflect how science has proceeded, claiming new-found lands, dividing them into parts,