Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Ancient units of measure were directly based on the dimensions of the human body. We still use quite a few of them today. One definition of the inch was the length of the (royal) thumb from tip to first joint. The foot covers a narrow spread of distances based on the lengths of human feet, among which our imperial twelve-inch foot is about average. As well as being the width of four palms, a cubit is the length from the elbow to the longest finger tip, and is usually equated to eighteen inches, but sometimes to twenty-one or more. An ell, derived from the Latin for elbow, ulna, was originally the same as a cubit. Later, the ell was adopted as a unit for measuring cloth at a much longer forty-five inches. It may have taken the name because measuring out involved holding the cloth in the fingers of one hand up to the opposite shoulder and then straightening the elbow until the arm is outstretched on its rightful side. At any rate, I am a little shorter than Le Corbusier’s English hero, and this distance comes to nearly forty-five inches on me.

  All of these units of measurement start from a different part of the body. There is nothing that says they have to be in simple arithmetic relationship to one another. So the fact that they have been put together in just this way – twelve inches making exactly one foot, for example – is evidence that Vitruvius and his mathematizing idealism has stayed with us.

  These measures, however, are all linear. The body is less helpful when it comes to areas, masses and volumes. A few units are based not on man’s dimensions but on his capabilities. An acre is the area that a man and his ox were supposed to be able to plough in a day, for example. But quantities such as the weight that a man can lift or the volume of water (or beer) he can drink are so variable that the body no longer provides a good standard. Even Vitruvian six-footers can be scrawny or stout. Nevertheless, there is a smattering of other so-called anthropic measures, even including units of time. In Hindu tradition, nimesha is the length of a blink of an eye and paramaanus is the interval between blinking.

  The importance of being the right size is made apparent in stories where it all goes wrong. Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels are two of the best-loved tales where the relative size of the central character becomes important. Alice and Gulliver undergo instructively different experiences. When Alice first drinks from the bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’ and finds herself shrinking, and then eats the cake that makes her grow again, she extrapolates from what is happening to her to imagine the horrible consequences of being taken to the extreme of either scale – perhaps ‘going out altogether, like a candle’. Alice is in a world where measurement – and even number itself – can no longer be relied upon, as she finds when she tries to recite her multiplication tables and they too come out wrong.

  Gulliver’s measure of things, on the other hand, remains rock-steady. He confidently describes the tallest trees in Lilliput as ‘seven foot high’, while in Brobdingnag one of the reapers who find him hoists him aloft ‘above sixty foot from the ground’. The reader understands from this that Gulliver retains his proper size. Calculations are a feature of Gulliver’s Travels, too, most notably when the Lilliputians calculate that they must feed Gulliver 1,728 times as much food as they require for themselves, since Gulliver is twelve times their size in all three dimensions (and twelve cubed is 1,728).

  Alice clearly changes size down the rabbit hole, whereas Gulliver visits different-sized lands. In both stories, though, the rule of law is strenuously asserted. ‘You’ve no right to grow here,’ the Dormouse admonishes Alice as she begins to resume her proper scale in preparation for her return above ground. ‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court,’ barks the King. The Emperor of Lilliput likewise imposes conditions on Gulliver: ‘First, the Man-Mountain shall not depart from our dominions, without our licence under our great seal.’ Size matters, and being the wrong size calls for disciplinary measures to bring the offender back into line.

  Today, we have largely relinquished the notion of ideal man. The eighteenth-century painter and cartoonist William Hogarth declared that it was impossible to find geometry in human faces, and celebrated their irregularity in his satirical caricatures. In a section headed ‘Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in the Human Species’ in his famous essay of 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke refuted the whole concept, pointing out that ‘ideal’ proportions could be found in people judged beautiful and ugly alike. ‘You may assign any proportion you please to every part of the human body; and I undertake that a painter shall religiously observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure.’ He reserved special criticism for Vitruvian man. Man was never based on a square; he was, if anything, more like its opposite, a cross. ‘The human figure never supplied the architect with any of his ideas.’

  Thanks to a Belgian pioneer of statistics and social science, Adolphe Quetelet, we have now instead the idea of ‘average’ man and woman, a development in thinking about humanity that required the invention of statistics, with its concept of mean (average) and standard deviation (the extent of the variance either side of the average). Quetelet was the first to gather systematic data on human height and weight, introducing the concept of the average man (l’homme moyen) in a book of 1835. Quetelet even found a way to decouple the two measures, so that people could be usefully described as heavy or light for their size, introducing the index now named after him, better known to most of us as the body-mass index.

  Quetelet’s new approach gave licence for a vast exercise in data collection. The field of study that emerged was christened anthropometry a few years later. In recognizing that one person was physically different from another and that measuring those variations might yield useful information, the anthropometrists implicitly acknowledged that one human was as valid as another and so in effect rejected the concept of ideal man.

  Such data was too powerful to be left solely in the hands of scientists. In the Museum of the Prefecture of Police in Paris is a reconstruction of an unusual photographic studio. In addition to the huge cameras of the day, it contains an assortment of calipers and rulers and other paraphernalia for measuring subjects as well as capturing their image. This was where Alphonse Bertillon introduced the world’s first scientific identity cards. In addition to frontal and profile photographs, Bertillon’s cards gave major body dimensions – and some surprising minor ones, including sixteen characteristics describing the shape of the ear. He tried them out on members of his family. His own card, made on 14 May 1891 when he was thirty-eight, shows him with a trim beard, short wiry hair and a high forehead, his head seeming a little too large for his body. In fact, we can read from the card that his head was 19.4 centimetres tall, while his height from the waist was 78 centimetres and his chest was 95.2 centimetres around. His left foot measured 27.4 centimetres. Bertillon, curiously, came from a family that seems to have had a genetic predisposition to this sort of work: his elder brother was the director of statistics for the city of Paris; his father founded its school of anthropology; and his grandfather had developed the work of Quetelet and coined the word demographics. Bertillon’s innovations – he also introduced crime-scene photography – saw him rise from a lowly clerical position when he joined the Paris police in 1879 to lead its influential Judicial Identity Service less than a decade later. ‘Bertillonage’ was soon taken up by police services around the world. Although it could not be used to establish definite guilt, as further persons not known to the police might have similar measurements, Bertillon’s method was nevertheless good enough to rule out suspects from police enquiries if they did not match a witness’s description.

  It was not possible to prove guilt by using body measurements until the discovery that fingerprints are unique to each individual. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, William Herschel, a British colonial administrator in Bengal, made himself even more unpopular than he doubtless was already by requiring local workers to guarantee their contracts with a handprint. Hersc
hel also recorded his own fingerprints over a period of years, showing that they did not change. His work was noticed by Francis Galton, one of the foremost figures in Victorian science. Even by the standards of the age, Galton was obsessed with measurement. Over the course of an indefatigable career spanning seventy years, he made many contributions to science, including drawing up the first weather maps, questionnaires and intelligence tests. He invented a handheld ‘pocket registrator’, a bit like the devices used by aircraft flight attendants to count passengers, which could track five independent variables at once, according to which buttons you depressed. The journal Nature noted that it would enable scientists ‘to take anthropological statistics of any kind among crowds of people without exciting observation’. Galton simply could not rest. One of his papers was titled ‘Notes on Ripples in Bathwater’. Another time, in a dull lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, he sought to derive a quantitative index of human boredom from the rate of fidgeting among members of the audience. His true legacy was not in any one thing that he measured, but in the advances he contributed to the methods of statistics needed to process all his data.

  Galton studied the prints Herschel had made along with prints from other subjects, using a pantograph he had built for measuring moths’ wings to trace and magnify key details. He noticed that no two fingerprints appeared to be the same, but was able to go further than this and confirm their uniqueness by statistical analysis. Galton had corresponded with Bertillon – both men proudly carried their own Bertillon system identity cards – and had been influential in recommending Bertillonage to British police forces. Fingerprints had occasionally been used, like the other measurements made by Bertillon, as a means of disproving a suspect’s connection with a crime. But now Galton saw that fingerprinting was actually a far more powerful technique that could be used for catching criminals. In 1902, Rose Guilder, a parlourmaid, noticed a thumbprint in new paintwork following a burglary in the house where she worked. It was the first time that fingerprint evidence was brought to court. Galton, meanwhile, pursued his own research agenda, collecting thousands of prints in a futile hope that he might be able to use them to demonstrate people’s relatedness.

  Galton held an ardent admiration for his cousin Charles Darwin. (Possibly it is not a coincidence that among his many books is one titled Hereditary Genius.) But where Darwin studied the animal kingdom, Galton focused on his fellow man. And woman. Travelling through Africa with a party of missionaries as a young man in 1850, he was startled to observe the wife of one of the party’s interpreters, ‘a charming person, not only a Hottentot in figure, but in that respect a Venus among the Hottentots’. Naturally, he wished to obtain her measurements. But there was a difficulty. ‘I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be.’ He dared not ask the interpreter to negotiate for him. Yet there she was, ‘turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do’. Then Galton realized that his instruments held the solution to his dilemma. He picked up his sextant and, standing at a respectable distance, recorded ‘her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms’.

  In 1884, Galton set up a laboratory at the International Health Exhibition held at South Kensington in London, and gathered data from volunteering visitors on their ‘Keenness of Sight and of Hearing; Colour Sense, Judgment of Eye; Breathing Power; Reaction Time; Strength of Pull and of Squeeze; Force of Blow; Span of Arms; Height, both standing and sitting; and Weight’. He used the new technique of photography to make ‘composite’ portraits, layering up individual exposures to produce a supposed average. In this way, he sought – vainly, again – to distill the typical appearance of many diverse populations. All in all, Galton’s anthropometric project was far-reaching, and we shall hear more from him in later chapters.

  Scientists do not need misleading syntheses like Galton’s composites, but they do need typical specimens. Zoologists keep one specimen of every animal, which they call the holotype of the species. It is the benchmark against which other specimens are compared to see if they belong to that species or some other. The scientist who first described the species has the privilege of selecting the holotype. These holotypes are scattered through the university museums of the world.

  So where is the human holotype? For that matter, who is the human holotype? Oddly, there isn’t really one. This is partly because holotypes are only a designated requirement for species described since 1931, and partly because there is no scientific ambiguity about membership of the human species. (Racists might disagree, but their objections arise in large part because different races can interbreed, which demonstrates our common humanity.) In 1959, however, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was nominated for the position, even though he had been dead for 181 years. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1758 introduced the nomenclature for species that we still use today, and included his description of our species, with the new name he gave it of Homo sapiens. He has not been the only candidate. More recently, a story emerged that the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope put himself forward for the job. Shortly before his death in 1897, Cope sold his fossils to the American Museum of Natural History, and instructed that his own remains were to be preserved in aid of this unusual bid for immortality. The exercise may have been a last hurrah in the scientist’s battle with his palaeontological rival in the ‘bone wars’, Othniel Charles Marsh, as he also wished that his brain be weighed to see if it was more massive than Marsh’s – a challenge which Marsh failed to take up. Cope’s bid failed because his story only came to light much later, when, unknown to his latterday backers, Linnaeus had already been adopted in the post – although his bones are likely to remain undisturbed in their grave at Uppsala in Sweden.

  The constant search for a standard reference image of the human body ends for now with something called the Visible Human Project. We have come a long way from Vitruvius and Polykleitos. And today both man and woman are presented – although, as usual, man came first.

  The Visible Human Project began in 1988 as an initiative of the United States National Library of Medicine in response to the rise of two new technological possibilities: first, the ability to freeze human tissue without damaging it; and second, the rise of digital image processing. The idea was to take a human cadaver, slice it up and then photograph it to put together the first detailed visual reference of the human interior based on an actual body.

  As with the anatomized bodies painted by Rembrandt and others long before, the chosen subject was a convicted criminal. Joseph Paul Jernigan of Waco, Texas, was executed in 1993 by injection with a lethal dose of potassium chloride, twelve years after being sentenced to death for burglary and murder. Prompted by the prison chaplain, and unable to donate his organs for transplant as they would be poisoned by the potassium chloride, he signed a consent form to donate his whole body. Jernigan passed the ‘audition’ because he suffered from no disfiguring disease and had not undergone major surgery, either of which would have made him anatomically unrepresentative. The authorities must have been keen to press on with the project, though, because Jernigan was not quite ideal, having had an appendectomy and missing a tooth. Within hours of his execution, Jernigan’s body was flown to the University of Colorado and recorded as a set of magnetic resonance images for reference. Then it was frozen and scanned again. Once solidified, the body was sliced sequentially in planes parallel to those used in the MRI scans, one millimetre at a time, and the exposed sections were photographed. The tissue shaved off each time was reduced to ‘sawdust’.

  The National Library of Medicine put the images on a website in November 1994.
The overall view of Jernigan shows a moderately overweight man with a shaven head and a short, thick neck. He is heavily tattooed and highly recognizable. The sections through his body, on the other hand, are baffling to the untrained eye. Each looks like a massive chop in a butcher’s shop. It is hard to discern even major organs amid the dark red tissue, in marked contrast with the prepared cadavers I had seen in Oxford. The effect of reducing the three-dimensional complexity of the human body to a series of flat planes is once again to remake the body as a kind of map, with nameless islands of red in a sea of yellow fat.

  A female visible human was added a year later. She remains anonymous, known merely as a ‘Maryland housewife’, who died of a heart attack aged fifty-nine. She has a rather square head with a broad mouth and rounded chin. She too is almost neckless. The National Library of Medicine anticipated that the Visible Human Project would mainly benefit medical students, but uptake has been far wider, with many others finding the idea of visualization too powerful to resist and going on to produce their own fly-throughs along blood vessels or atlases of parts relevant to their own specialisms. It has generated popular interest, too. The media and even scientists involved with the Visible Human Project often refer to the two subjects as ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. ‘Adam’ has had the most coverage, because he came first, because his nefarious life is known to us and because of the belief that he might have earned a kind of redemption by giving his body indirectly to save other lives. Destroyed as a consequence of his punishment, he has been digitally reconstituted – almost reincarnated, in the literal sense of that word, meaning ‘restored in bodily form’. Such narratives are absent from the visible woman. Her untold story is this: she is the more scientifically valuable of the pair. Recorded later, she was cut into thinner slices – three times as many in all – to yield a more detailed library of images. Almost biblically, however, it is ‘Adam’ who continues to be the primary reference. Most mainstream research has been based on him, while ‘Eve’ has been ‘primarily used for reproductive anatomy’.