The Seeds of Life Read online

  Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman, from 1656, captures the ghastliness of dissections in the 1600s and 1700s. The naked man at the center of the painting was a thief known as Black Jan, who had been executed by hanging. The prisoner’s exposed brain is the focus of the day’s lesson. His intestines and stomach have already been removed, as was customary, because they spoiled quickly. Jan’s dirty feet jut out toward the viewer; his head sits askew on his chest because his neck was broken on the gallows. High above the stage in Amsterdam’s Anatomy Theatre (but not depicted in Rembrandt’s close-up view), a few words inscribed in golden letters offered a moral: “Evil men, who did harm when alive, do good after their deaths.”

  FIGURE 5.1. Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson.

  These macabre scenes played out a bit like seventeenth-century horror films, but also as something more edifying, perhaps even uplifting. Here was a chance to see what physicians of the day called “secrets of nature revealed by God.” In Amsterdam, Bologna, London, Padua, Paris, and every other city that aspired to the first rank in medicine, students and curious laypersons shoved their way into anatomical theaters like the one Rembrandt depicted. Hundreds of spectators jammed together, in steeply rising tiers so that everyone could see the corpse on the stage below, displayed on a rotating, wheeled table.

  Dissections of female bodies drew the biggest crowds, partly because female subjects were rare. A pregnant woman drew best of all, since the anatomist could take up such topics as the mysterious womb. Many of these women had been hanged as thieves or prostitutes. A few had died in childbirth, unmarried and abandoned.

  Public dissections were performances carried out with elaborate ceremony. Rules stipulated that the ground be covered with a mat, so that “Mr. Doctor be made not to take cold upon his feet” and spelled out exactly how many aprons, knives, candles, and other tools the anatomist would need. In most venues a chandelier crowded with scented candles hung above the stage.

  Like audiences at a play, noblemen in elegant dress craned to see, as did tradesmen in their work apparel, tourists making the rounds, courting couples eager for a bit of a frisson on their night out, and even children who had managed to sneak their way past the doorkeepers. A flutist provided tasteful accompaniment. In Amsterdam, rules forbade laughing and talking, as well as stealing hearts or kidneys or livers from the victim’s body as they made their rounds through the audience.

  Ticket prices varied from nothing at all in Padua “in order that everyone may come” to enjoy the spectacle to the equivalent of a few dollars in Holland. The surgeons’ guild in Amsterdam customarily used some of its profits for a lavish postdissection banquet (and a generous tip for the hangman), with wine and tobacco and a parade to cap the evening.*

  Dissections took place in winter; summer’s heat would have made it nearly unbearable to delve into an open body. Even so, the whole procedure was a race against decay. In the interest of speed, different bodies were used to show different internal structures. One corpse might serve for a lecture on muscles, a second for bones, and a third for internal organs, in much the same way that anatomy books would one day use drawings on different layers of transparent plastic to depict heart and lungs, and bones, and nerves.

  NEVER A BASHFUL GROUP, ANATOMISTS CONFRONTED THE SHORTAGE of bodies with ingenuity and gusto. The first and most esteemed of all modern anatomists, a brash young Belgian named Andreas Vesalius, had showed the way in the mid-1500s. “First you must obtain a corpse from somewhere,” he wrote. “What sort does not matter, though one emaciated by disease is much the best.”

  That passage occurs in Vesalius’s masterpiece, On the Fabric of the Human Body. The book appeared in the momentous year 1543, which saw the publication of two of the most important books in Western history. One was Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which proclaimed that the Earth travels around the sun and not vice versa. The second was Vesalius’s atlas of human anatomy, one of the most significant and most beautiful books ever published.

  FIGURE 5.2. TWO images from Vesalius’s masterpiece, On the Fabric of the Human Body.

  That beauty rose from hideous roots. Vesalius first ventured into anatomy, he wrote, on a day in 1536 when he had the good fortune to find a corpse dangling from a gibbet. In his telling, his excursion in search of a body was a lark, the kind of boys-will-be-boys prank that Tom Sawyer might have got up to if his brand of mischief had run less to tricking his friends into painting a fence and more toward tugging bones free from a dried-up corpse.

  Vesalius had set out with a friend “in the hope of seeing some bones.” In the sixteenth century, this was no great challenge. “We went to the place where, to the great advantage of students, all who have suffered the death penalty are displayed by the public highway for the benefit of the rustics.” There the two adventurers found a body that had been hanging outdoors for a year. The victim had evidently been burned alive, as punishment for some forgotten transgression. Vesalius described the scene lightheartedly. The dead man had been “as it were toasted over a straw fire, and, tied to his stake, he had provided the birds with such a tasty meal that the bones were completely bare.”

  Vesalius delighted in his unexpected good fortune. Typically, “despite a popular image to the contrary, the birds normally peck away nothing but the eyes, because the skin is so thick, and as the skin remains intact, the bones decay inside and are quite useless for teaching purposes.” But not this time! With his friend’s help, Vesalius clambered up the stake and wrestled a thighbone away from the hip. Then he yanked off a shoulder blade, and arms, and a hand. He sneaked his treasures home and returned for more, in the dead of night. “So keen and eager was I to obtain these bones that I did not flinch from going at midnight amongst all those corpses and pulling down what I wanted.” In the end, Vesalius managed to find nearly everything he needed (except one hand and one foot, which he pulled from another body). He treated and cleaned the bones, strung them together, and then proudly unveiled a full skeleton.

  Doctors in ages past, Vesalius scolded, had prepared bodies for study in ways that were “troublesome, dirty, and difficult.” Scornful of those approaches and thrilled with his own innovations, Vesalius happily shared his techniques. Everyone could explore these mysteries. All they had to do was follow a few simple steps.

  Utterly unsqueamish, Vesalius wrote as if he were teaching a cooking class for Macbeth’s witches. “Having thus placed the bones in the cauldron,” he instructed his readers, “fill it up with enough water to cover the bones completely.” He dotted his text with tips and warnings. “As usual in boiling, the scum should be carefully removed,” he advised, and he offered the useful reminder that “the object of the seething is to enable the bones to be scraped clean with a knife, as in meat for eating.”

  IT IS EASY TO MISUNDERSTAND VESALIUS AND TO CONCLUDE, FROM the light, self-satisfied tone in which he discussed his dark adventures, that he was a brutal man. We should be wary of such judgments. The past is indeed a foreign country and, by our standards, an astonishingly violent one. The most routine sights in sixteenth-century France or seventeenth-century England would leave us reeling in horror. For years on end, for instance, the severed heads of executed criminals stared out from spikes mounted on London Bridge and elsewhere around the city. The dried, leathery heads drew scarcely any notice.

  Sightseers in Shakespeare’s London who tired of puppet shows and bear baitings might choose instead to visit an asylum; the ravings of lunatics made excellent entertainment. So did the moans of a prisoner locked in the pillory, as the wretch turned this way and that to dodge the rotten tomatoes and dead cats hurled at him.

  The modern world prefers to hide its cruelties. The world of our forebears had no such qualms. Hangings drew boisterous crowds that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. Spectators gulped their drinks and devoured their lunches while cheering for those miscreants who managed a few jaunty words when the hangman fit a noose around their neck.

>   The taste of the educated and refined was no daintier than that of the rabble. On the evening of October 13, 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he had gone “to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered,” which is to say, hanged but taken alive from the gallows and then disemboweled, as the victim himself watched. “Which was done there,” Pepys wrote jokily, “he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.” A few sentences later, in the same diary entry, Pepys tells us that he had oysters for dinner.

  Vesalius would happily have joined Pepys at his meal. The chapters of his masterpiece begin with elaborate, frank illustrations. Book I’s drawing depicts the chubby, adorable toddlers known as putti boiling a body in a kettle, to prepare a skeleton. Book VII opens with a drawing of putti robbing a grave.*

  AS THE FIELD OF ANATOMY GREW BETTER ESTABLISHED, THE hunt for bodies intensified. Taboos against dissection ruled out most “respectable” bodies. That called for ingenuity. Laws spelling out who could be dissected varied from country to country. Italy preferred criminals but in a pinch made do with “Jews or other infidels.” England seemed less likely to run short of material, because in theory a long list of offenses—some as minor as cattle rustling and even shoplifting—could draw a death sentence. In practice that seldom happened, and the supply of bodies from executed criminals could not keep up with the demand. (William Harvey’s college at Cambridge had a contract assuring it the bodies of two criminals a year, freshly executed and free of charge.)

  For centuries, scarcely any space separated the study of anatomy from the work of the hangman. In Britain, in 1752, that gap closed completely. A new but poorly thought-out law made it illegal to dissect anyone except a criminal fresh from the gallows. That made for fewer bodies than ever available for study. As a result, body snatching became a high-paying criminal specialty.

  So-called resurrection men crept into cemeteries in the dark and sneaked their way to a fresh grave. Wielding wooden trowels—so that the clink! of a metal shovel against a rock or the coffin didn’t give the game away—the grave robbers dug a shaft straight down to the head of the coffin. For speed’s sake, they left the coffin undisturbed along most of its length. Next the resurrection men tied a rope around the coffin’s exposed end and stuffed a canvas sheet into the freshly dug hole, to muffle any sounds.

  Then a sharp yank upward on the rope! Wedged into the ground, the coffin cracked open. The grave robbers grabbed their prize by the armpits and pulled it free. They tidied the site so it would not catch a watchman’s eye and raced off. Elapsed time: under an hour.*

  A fresh body delivered to an anatomist’s door might bring as much money as a workman could earn in six months. Newspaper headlines warned of “Church Yard Pirates.” To thwart body snatchers, coffins were secured with metal bands or placed inside iron frames.† Not content with such defensive measures, some people booby-trapped their relatives’ coffins with gunpowder, rigged to explode if anyone tried to break in.

  For decades, everyone knew about anatomy’s dark side, but no one confronted it. Finally, in Scotland in 1828, matters took an especially hideous turn. Two Irish immigrants living in Edinburgh decided that grave robbing was too cumbersome a way to obtain corpses. Instead, over the course of twelve months, William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen people and sold their bodies to a celebrated anatomist named Robert Knox, at the University of Edinburgh. Murder was an ancient crime, wrote one horrified journalist, but a murder like this “was never, we believe, heard of before.”

  Burke and Hare (with the help of their wives) coaxed their victims to drink too much. Then they suffocated them and delivered the bodies to Knox. The pair were no masterminds, but the police were scarcely more capable, and they could not put together a strong case. (They had only one body, the others having already been dissected, and they could not prove that the dead woman they found had been murdered, because suffocation left no marks.)

  In the end, Burke was found guilty and sentenced to death. (Hare was let off, in return for his testimony against his partner.) Dr. Knox claimed not to have known anything whatever about murder. He did not maintain that he had dissected only criminals who had been executed, as the law required, but he insisted that he procured his subjects in the most above-board fashion. His assistants “watched the low lodging houses” to see who was ailing, Knox explained, and then purchased the bodies of newly dead paupers from their relatives. Knox was never charged and went on to practice medicine for another three decades.

  Burke was hanged before a crowd of thirty thousand gleeful, shouting, hat-waving spectators on a cold and rainy January morning in 1829. The next day he was dissected (but not by Knox) at the University of Edinburgh. His skeleton is still on display at the university’s Anatomy Museum. As perhaps a more significant legacy of the murders, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act in 1832. The new law put an end to the practice of dissecting criminals who had been executed. Instead, it gave medical schools permission—despite the fearful protests of many of the poor—to dissect bodies that had gone unclaimed at death.

  FIGURE 5.3. The skeleton of the murderer William Burke, at Edinburgh Medical School. The judge ordered him hanged and then dissected and put on public view, “in order that posterity may keep in remembrance of your atrocious crimes.”

  All these difficulties—finding bodies to study; fighting down the horror of cutting up corpses in cold, dank rooms; deducing the workings of the living body from the structures of a dead one—plagued every early anatomist.

  These were formidable obstacles, and in practice they proved even more daunting than anyone had anticipated. For those looking to understand the mysteries of sex and conception in particular, the challenge was greater still. Vesalius, a man whose confidence spilled over and ran onto the ground, had rushed eagerly ahead. First he’d pored over a stack of pages that “reached from heaven to earth,” to learn what medical men before him had discovered about the physiology of sex. Alas, his reading explained nothing. Vesalius found himself “storm-tossed upon a mighty sea of opinions and theories.” He had plunged ahead with his own dissections, but in the end he conceded that although he had uncovered new facts, he had left the central mystery untouched.

  Such frustration was all but inevitable. For Vesalius and the other venturesome explorers in medicine’s early days, the deepest problems were conceptual rather than logistical. Confront an unfamiliar sight, and many times you cannot grasp what you are looking at. Take Leonardo. Genius though he was, Leonardo had studied the heart with enormous care without ever recognizing that it is a pump or that blood circulates around the body. Historians have struggled to explain why not.*

  They note, for instance, that Leonardo’s dislike of vivisection meant that, unlike Harvey, he never saw a heart in action. More important, perhaps, was a different sight that Leonardo missed. By Harvey’s day firefighters had begun using powerful pumps that shot out jets of water. Leonardo, born a century earlier, had no such experience to draw on.

  Seeing is not the same as understanding. Until you have broken the code, a printed word is not “eagle” or “moonlight” but just an inky squiggle. A hunter’s bow is not a weapon but only a bit of wood and cord. An opened-up human body is not an intricate machine but a dark, crowded morass.

  The modern-day doctor and writer Jonathan Miller has described the bewilderment of medical students, today, when they first encounter a body’s interior. Their immersion in textbook drawings and plastic models helps only so much. “The unsuspecting student plunges into the laboratory carcass expecting to find these neat arrangements repeated in nature,” Miller writes, “and the blurred confusion which he actually meets often produces a sense of despair. The heart is not nearly so clearly distinguished from its vessels as the textbook implies, and at first sight the vessels are practically indistinguishable from one another.”

  And those frustrated st
udents are only trying to confirm what others have already found. Leonardo and Vesalius and Harvey were out to make discoveries, an immensely harder challenge.

  SIX

  DOOR A OR DOOR B?

  FOR THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY AFTER VESALIUS’S DEATH, the Where do babies come from? mystery languished in a cold-case file. Then, in the early 1600s, William Harvey took it up. He had two motives. One was ambition. Harvey was the leading anatomist of his day. To solve the greatest anatomical riddle of all, and one that had stymied all his predecessors, would cap a daunting career. The second reason was more important: William Harvey had a new idea.

  Harvey set up the mystery as if he had grabbed hold of a telescope—a brand-new invention in his day—and used it to look back in time rather than out in space. “A Man was first a Boy,” he wrote. “… Before he was a Boy, he was an Infant; and before an Infant, an Embryo.” And before that? Harvey had an answer. Hippocrates and Aristotle and Galen had proposed answers, too. For fifteen centuries afterward, everyone had parroted them. They’d all had it wrong, Harvey declared. He would set matters straight.

  HARVEY WAS HIGH-STRUNG, SELF-ASSURED, FAST-MOVING, AND fast-thinking. He scarcely slowed even at night. When he ought to have been sleeping, he found himself awake against his will, and he passed the night hours pacing endless, restless circles in his bedroom. In the anatomy theater, though, he performed with mastery and flair. He strutted around the stage, circling the body laid out before him, with his long, white sleeves flapping as he drew his audience’s attention to particular body parts with a wand made of whalebone and tipped in silver.