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

comprehension of the body is the profusion of Greek and Latin names – names that those in the medical professions were themselves once put to great labour to learn. There is an argument that these provide a universal language much like the Mass sung in Latin, but I am not convinced. So I have tried to minimize my use of these words, many of which were baffling to me as I set out. I won’t use ‘anterior’ where ‘front’ will do, or ‘femur’ for ‘thigh bone’. It seems wrong that the parts of our own bodies should be described in a vocabulary that is alien to us.
    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and pee.

Prologue: The Anatomy Lesson
     
    Who, I am wondering, is the subject of this painting?
    I am at the Mauritshuis, one of the world’s great collections of Dutch art, housed in a perfect little palace on the lakeside in the centre of The Hague. I have just seen Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring . Its sheer beauty produces a choke of emotion. Now, two rooms away, I am standing in front of Rembrandt’s painting known as The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp .
    It is his breakthrough painting. Rembrandt arrived in Amsterdam in 1631 aged twenty-five looking for portrait work. He found it almost immediately when Nicolaes Tulp, the praelector, or public lecturer, of the Amsterdam guild of surgeons, asked the young artist to paint him with his fellow guild members. The job must have surpassed Rembrandt’s hopes for it offered a fantastic challenge: to paint not just one man but many men, to find a way to communicate the individuality of each of them, and yet also to conform to the expectations of the seventeenth-century equivalent of a team photograph. And would there, Rembrandt must have mused as he accepted the work, be scope also to tell a more universal story?
    It is a massive canvas. It shows a group of seven men, almost life-size, attending closely to Doctor Tulp, who sits in an armchair, enthroned and slightly elevated, demonstrating a point of detail in human anatomy. Yet it may not be Doctor Tulp who is the subject, as the earringed girl is so obviously the subject of the Vermeer. The painting’s title only came later. It is, as it was meant to be, a genre painting of a group of professional achievers. The identities are known of the other men depicted. They too are surgeons. They may appear agog to learn, but Tulp’s audience in the painting are his equally proficient peers. He has no anatomy lesson for them. So perhaps all the surgeons together are the subject. It was they who paid for the painting, and it was immediately hung on the wall in their guild.

     
    But I don’t think these fellows with their florid cheeks and extravagant ruffs are truly the subject either. For us, and for Rembrandt, the true subject is the one remaining person in the picture – the dead man on the dissection table around whom the surgeons are gathered.
    He is, or was, Adriaen Adriaenszoon, nicknamed ’t Kint, ‘the kid’, twenty-eight years old, and well known to the courts for a string of assaults and thefts over the preceding nine years. In Amsterdam, in that winter of 1631–2, he swiped a man’s cape. Unfortunately for Adriaenszoon, his victim resisted, and he was caught. He was tried and sentenced to death by hanging, to be followed by dissection of his body, the usual punishment for serious crimes, dissection having been added specifically to disabuse criminals and their families of any hope they might still cling to of a Christian bodily resurrection. Three days later, on 31 January 1632, his lifeless corpse was taken down from one of the gallows that lined the city’s waterfront and moved, ready for the final stage of its punishment, to the city’s anatomy theatre.
    For in the seventeenth century a dissection was indeed a theatrical occasion. One could only take place when there was a fresh body available, usually from a criminal execution. It would have to happen in the winter months, when the cold