Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body Read Free Page A

proclaiming dominion over them on behalf of specialist new disciplines. It is, I might add, a very male approach, never more so than when it is the female body that is being explored.
    At one point in my research, I noted something peculiar about my reading list. I was being curiously drawn to books set on islands – Robinson Crusoe for its all-important human footprint, Gulliver’s Travels for the changes in human scale it imposes, Typee for the tattoos and the cannibals, The Island of Dr Moreau for the vivisection and the human-animal hybrids. Why was this? Islands present isolated populations. Here, humans are almost a subspecies of Homo sapiens , ripe for the kind of anthropological scrutiny that might seem impertinent among the home population. Islands are places where, for a time, you can observe and control a community as if it is part of an experiment. But the situation cannot be sustained. Eventually, the hero escapes to tell his improbable tale (or not, in the case of Dr Moreau’s visitor, who pretends amnesia because what he has seen is so incredible). As John Donne famously reminds us in his Meditations : ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’
    These fictional island laboratories are places for the exploration not just of human nature writ large, but also of the identity of the individual. The body may be seen as territory with parts that have been more or less thoroughly explored, but somewhere within that territory, we are convinced, is a special place, the seat of the soul, as we once said, or of the self, as we might say today. In medieval times, a person’s heart was often preserved or buried separately from the rest of the body because it was the part thought to be most closely associated with the soul. During the Renaissance, a more sophisticated notion took over. The soul was to be found in the divine proportions of the human body, which was the answering microcosm to the macrocosm of the ordered universe. The ideal bodies and the anatomies of this period, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man to Rembrandt’s paintings of dissections, reflect this belief. With the progress of science, however, the urge to find a focal point was soon reasserted. Attention settled on the head, as physiognomists sought their answers to the problem of the self in human expression and phrenologists in the bumps of the skull. Today, we look at magnetic resonance imaging scans of the brain and believe these bring us closer to knowing our selves. It seems that only a visual image will give us the reassurance we seek.
    This need to see the self is strong because we live in a society that prizes human individualism, and also because we sense that the self is susceptible to manipulation in ways that it never has been before. We are aware that our personal identity may be altered – and perhaps improved – by consciously undertaken extension. Such extension may be psychological (self-help books), physical (cosmetic surgery), chemical (mind-altering drugs) or technological (virtual environments). At the moment, these possibilities are perhaps only crudely being tested. However, it seems certain that in future it will be increasingly easy, and probably increasingly acceptable, to manipulate both the external appearance of the body and our genetic make-up, and that this may disrupt what one bioethicist calls the former ‘naturalness of the self’.
    These are exciting and troubling times for the human body. We seem both excessively aware of it and yet at the same time profoundly dissatisfied with it. The biological sciences promise many things about the way we will live in future. But, however beautiful we are, however super-capable we become, however long we live, we still must inhabit our bodies. Perhaps, by recognizing the human body as a site of continual invention, we may overcome the distortions of the present moment.
    Finally, one barrier to a broader