Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Bosch’s hell is also a clamorous place, so full of musical instruments that some of its denizens are stopping their ears against the din. Physicians note that the giant ears, however, lack auditory canals – they cannot hear anyway. The inner and middle ear contain the mechanisms by which we are able to hear, while the outer ear or auricle acts merely as a sound collector, a point brutally made in Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, when the gangster Mr Blonde severs the captive policeman’s ear and then speaks into it to see if its owner can hear him. The auricles capture and direct sound into the inner ear – when people with jug ears request surgery to make them less prominent, they are actually likely to hear a little less well as a result. René Magritte (Belgian, not Dutch) graphically suggests how sound might be funnelled into the ear in a small gouache no less surreal than Bosch’s image. His Untitled (Shell in the Form of an Ear) shows a giant vermiform shell lying on a beach; its spiralling recursions are modelled on the human auricle.

  The English colloquialism ‘a word in your shell-like’, typically used by somebody about to vouchsafe a confidence, acknowledges this similarity. In fact, your ear is more shell-like than you may realize. Our ability to hear sounds of different pitch relies on the cochlea, a hollow bone shaped like a snail shell in the inner ear. It works a bit like a French horn in reverse. There are tiny hair cells all along this tapering tube, tuned according to where they are positioned, like the strings of a piano. They vibrate in response to different frequencies of sound transmitted into the cochlea by the action of the eardrum on the three tiny bones of the middle ear. These vibrations trigger nerve signals to the brain which we interpret as sound. It is amazing that these thousands of hairs can do their job simultaneously so that, in the Haydn symphony I am listening to as I write, I am able to distinguish each instrument that is playing by its individual pitch and timbre. When we lose the ability to hear high-pitched tones with increasing age, it is because some of these hair cells die off. My mild tone deafness, on the other hand, is not explained by physical shortcomings in the ear but a relative underdevelopment of part of my brain, which could probably be remedied with suitable aural exercises if I ever found the time.

  Some people believe the outer ear may be significant other than as a sound-gatherer. In the 1950s, a French doctor and acupuncturist named Paul Nogier noted that it resembles a curled human foetus (the lobe of the ear represents the head and the interior fold known as the antihelix the spine of the foetus in this case). The scheme of alternative medicine that he devised based on this resemblance is known as auriculotherapy. The patient’s ear is seen as a homunculus or map of the whole body, with stimulation at different points on it being used to treat ailments in corresponding parts of the body. The idea is perhaps not dissimilar to the ancient Greek belief that the ear provides a channel, via the mouth and throat, into the core of the body, and has echoes of the cauterization once used as a treatment for gross body pains such as sciatica, in which some of the flesh of the ear might be burned away using a hot iron. Noting that the ear we can see in Bosch’s painting is pierced in two places, Nogier and a colleague took these for acupuncture needle positions and tested the effect on some of their patients. They claim that stimulation at the entry point of their acupuncture needle was effective in suppressing the libido, while stimulation of the exit point heightened sexual interest.

  The long hairstyles of the time meant that Antoon van Dyck (who prospered in England during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, going on to be knighted as Sir Anthony) painted many portraits but few ears. One of the exceptions is in an early work, done when the artist was nineteen years old, showing the moment when Christ is captured in the Garden of Gethsemane after his betrayal by Judas. The painting is a chaos of violent action. In the foreground, the apostle Peter is holding Malchus, the servant of the arresting high priest, to the ground and is about to slice off his ear in an effort to prevent the arrest. The ear in question glistens redly as if anticipating the cut. Van Dyck’s Peter wields a short knife rather than the sword mentioned in the Bible, which makes the action seem more like a common street crime close to home. Jesus warns Peter to put away his blade (uttering the familiar ‘all who take the sword will perish by the sword’, in Matthew’s gospel). In the version according to Luke, who was a physician, Jesus also heals the ear by a touch of his hand, the only occasion in the whole of Scripture where he heals a fresh wound. This biblical episode has been a stock subject for artists. Most do not waste the opportunity to show Peter in the bloody act, but a few show the aftermath, either with the ear held triumphantly aloft or with the focus on Jesus’s remedial gesture. Wolfgang Pirsig has counted fifty-four such paintings, with the artists often choosing freely between left and right ears according to compositional convenience, even though two of the gospels specify that it was Malchus’s right ear that was severed. In three careless examples, Christ the healer is actually implanting the wrong ear into the wound on the side of Malchus’s head.

  Although it seems likely from the way the gospels describe the incident that Peter would have inflicted a mortal wound on Malchus, the taking of an ear has long been a favourite punishment. The War of Jenkins’ Ear – now an almost forgotten episode in British history – began with just such a forfeit. In 1731, Spanish coastguards boarded a British merchant ship, the Rebecca, making passage past Havana on her way home from Jamaica. The coastguard captain sliced off the left ear of Robert Jenkins, the Rebecca’s master, returning it to him to keep as a warning of what would befall other British ships that came his way. Jenkins did indeed tell his story to the king’s secretary at Hampton Court when he got home, but the matter lapsed. The actual orifice only became a cause célèbre seven years later, when relations with Spain were deteriorating over the matter of slave trading rights in the American territories. Jenkins was called before a committee of the House of Commons in March 1738 and supposedly produced the long-preserved ear in a jar. Jenkins was in fact a reluctant witness, having declined the first summons, and it seems likely that the committee was stacked with Members of Parliament lobbying in favour of war. Detailed records were not made of the committee session, and if Jenkins exhibited anything, it may well not have been his ear but simply a convenient piece of pig meat thrust into his hand as a prop by a lobbyist. Nevertheless, the ear – missing or present – offered a useful symbol of Papist Spanish cruelty to lay before the British public. Britain declared war on Spain the following year.

  We can lay the blame for the story on the over-active imagination of the Tory historian Thomas Carlyle, who coined the phrase ‘the war of Jenkins’ ear’ in his monumental history of Frederick II of Prussia, published in 1858. He refers to Jenkins producing ‘his Ear wrapt in cotton: – setting all on flame (except the Official persons) at sight of it’. ‘Official persons’ get the last word, though. The topic of Jenkins’ ear appears as one of the frequently asked questions on the Houses of Parliament website, where it draws the cool response that ‘it seems highly improbable that he would have kept it for seven years!’

  Barbaric ear severings continue to the present day. J. Paul Getty III had his right ear cut off when he was kidnapped by Italian gangsters in 1973. His captors demanded a large ransom from the Getty family, who refused to pay. ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren,’ said Getty’s famously mean grandfather. After three months of stalemate, Getty’s captors cut off the ear and sent it, along with a lock of hair, to a newspaper, and reduced their demands. The grandfather reportedly now paid up $2.2 million, ‘the maximum that his accountants said would be tax-deductible’. Four years later, Getty underwent surgery in Los Angeles to create a prosthetic auricle using a segment of cartilage taken from his rib.

  The best-known ear in Dutch art is of course the left ear of Vincent van Gogh, a missing part that looms so large it often seems to block our view of the man’s pictures. It has become what the critic Robert Hughes disgustedly calls ‘the Holy Ear’.

  A few days
before Christmas 1888, van Gogh quarrelled with his friend Paul Gauguin, whom he had persuaded to come and work with him in Arles. The Dutchman brandished a razor before the men went their separate ways. Later, van Gogh cut off his left ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel. ‘Keep this object carefully,’ he begged her. What she was to make of the gift is unclear, as is what happened to the ear after that. Van Gogh went home to bed, where the police found him the following morning lying almost unconscious on a blood-soaked pillow. This, at least, is the official version. However, an investigation by two German art historians has opened up another possibility. Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans believe that it was Gauguin who inflicted the damage using a sword during the fight, and that the two artists subsequently agreed on the (slightly) more plausible cover story. It is, after all, Gauguin’s written accounts that provide most of the evidence for the official story.

  What this still doesn’t explain is why, if it was van Gogh’s left ear that was severed, it is the right ear that appears extravagantly bandaged in his Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear done a month or two later. Another self-portrait from 1889, produced when the artist had somewhat recovered his mental health, shows him in three-quarters profile from the left side – with ear intact. When newspapers reported Kaufmann’s and Wildegans’s theory, several of them showed the portrait with the bandaged right ear while blithely referring to the severed left ear in the accompanying article.

  The explanation, of course, is that van Gogh painted himself from his image in a mirror. In both paintings, he wears the same greatcoat, which is buttoned at the top. The button is on the left and passes through the buttonhole on the right – the fashion for women’s coats. Men’s coats normally button the other way round, so this confirms that van Gogh worked from a mirror image. So does a sketch done by his friend Dr Gachet, showing van Gogh on his deathbed with the damaged tissue around the left ear clearly visible.

  Using a mirror seems a straightforward enough thing to do. Self-portraitists had been using mirrors since they became generally available, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is when the genre began. Rembrandt, for instance, was suddenly able to paint larger self-portraits when he acquired a larger mirror. But the practice raises a deeper question about identity. Doesn’t it matter that we are being shown left for right and right for left – if not to the viewer, who may be none the wiser, then at least to the artist himself? In this very obvious optical sense, the painting does not represent the artist’s true self. Jan van Eyck, painting Canon van der Paele, shows us the ugly truth of his damaged ear. Vincent van Gogh, painting himself, shows us a reflection of the truth, but perhaps a deeper truth, too. The common artist’s deceit of using a mirror is made to appear less a matter of unthinking procedure and more a matter of deliberate assertiveness by the striking asymmetry of his injury. It was relatively unimportant to van Gogh, as it was to so many self-portraitists before him, that he leave us with a mirror image of his ‘true’ self. It was more important that he show us his injury: in January 1889, the self-harm is the self-portrait.

  What are we to conclude about the ear from this little gallery? We have seen the ear as a site of ugliness and imperfection, as a symbol with many meanings, as an object of punishment, as a love token and as a badge of self-loathing mutilation. It is the plasticity of this modest appendage that enables it to perform so many roles. The outer ear is composed entirely of soft tissue and cartilage. There is no supporting bone. This means that it can be deformed and reformed, cut away and replaced. It is an exemplar of arbitrary human tissue.

  In this capacity, the flesh of the auricle may stand in for the whole body, either dead or alive. The Mimizuka monument in Kyoto – little known even among Japanese – contains the heaped-up severed ears of Koreans taken as trophies during the Japanese invasion in the 1590s; ears were taken in lieu of heads simply because so many were slaughtered, up to 126,000 according to one source. The removal of an auricle from a living subject leaves only a small wound and cuts no major blood vessels and so is unlikely to lead to death. It too may stand for the whole person, as we have seen with the unfortunate Jenkins.

  The function of this fleshy efflorescence in assisting hearing seems almost marginal – it is the inner ear that does the real work. The auricle comes across as a bit of a perk – an erotic bonus perhaps, somewhere useful to hook spectacles, or simply an ornament. It is flesh as a sculptural medium, a notion encouraged by its delightfully baroque curves. The crinkles that complicate the outer curve of the ear arise, incidentally, from an embryonic feature known as the six hillocks of Hiss. Some of these hillocks tell almost forgotten stories. A malformation called Darwin’s point, for instance, is the vestigial remnant of a fold that once allowed the auricle to flap closed over the opening of the ear canal, while another of the hillocks was once associated with criminality, and is still sometimes the focus of requests for cosmetic surgery.

  These ideas flourish in contemporary art and science, where the ear remains a locus for demonstrating technical prowess. As the art critic Edwina Bartlem observes: ‘Strangely enough, artificial ears are powerful signs of tissue culture engineering and biotechnologies more generally.’ The iconicity of the ear was only reinforced in 1995 when Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts and Linda Griffith-Cima at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology successfully engineered animal tissue in the shape of a human ear on the back of a live mouse. The growth had no hearing function. It was simply tissue that grew, nourished by the mouse, on a polyester scaffold that could have been made in any shape. So why an ear? One purpose of the experiment was to show that cartilaginous structures could be grown of a kind that in future might be suitable for use in ear transplants. The sculptural delight of the shape may also have played a part. In addition, the instant recognizability of an ear immediately enabled lay people to see the potential of the technology. Perhaps, too, the scientists hoped to generate a little shock value. In any case, the mouse-with-the-ear-on-its-back swiftly became a symbol not so much of the potential to engineer replacement human body parts as of the kind of silly thing scientists can get up to when left to their own devices.

  In 2003, an Australian group called Tissue Culture & Art, based at the University of Western Australia, began work with the artist Stelarc on a piece called Extra Ear ¼ Scale that seems at once to parody and to extend this work. The idea was to grow a quarter-scale replica of Stelarc’s ear from human tissue. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the artists behind Tissue Culture & Art, wrote of the original exercise in Massachusetts: ‘We were amazed by the confronting sculptural possibilities this technology might offer. The ear itself is a fascinating sculptural form, removed from its original context and placed on the back of a mouse; one could observe the ear in all of its sculptural glory.’ Stelarc has since gone on to construct a life-size ‘ear’ grafted on to his own forearm. The procedure required surgery first to grow extra skin on the arm and then to insert a porous polymer scaffold that would bond with the new tissue in the appropriate shape. Surgeons have performed similar operations as a part of procedures to rebuild damaged ears. Stelarc, however, has gone beyond cosmetic surgery with a disturbing attempt to supplement the body’s quota of functioning organs. The finished Ear on Arm incorporates a microphone as well as additional electronics to transmit sound and communicate via a Bluetooth connection, allowing people in remote locations to hear what the ‘ear’ is ‘hearing’; ‘an Internet organ,’ says Stelarc.

  The Eye

  The French philosopher René Descartes spent the most fruitful period of his life in the Dutch Republic, where he moved frequently between the academic centres – Franeker, Dordrecht, Leiden, Utrecht – developing his knowledge of mathematics, physics and physiology, before settling down in the remote seaside village of Egmond-Binnen to write out his new theory of everything. In 1632, he was to be found in Amsterdam; it is quite possible that he was among the audience at Dr Tulp’s anatomy demonstration.

  Descartes was no armchair philoso
pher. His radical ideas about the human body as a kind of mechanism, and the intellectual rigour that would soon turn him into an adjective – Cartesian – were based on first-hand observation and his own experiments. On one particular occasion during the 1630s, he took the unusual step of procuring the eye of an ox in order to understand more precisely the intricacies of vision.

  He described his results in an essay entitled La Dioptrique, a work that is neglected in comparison with the one that prefaced it, the illustrious Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, which includes the famous aphorism cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Descartes published La Dioptrique in 1637 at Leiden, accompanied by two additional volumes on meteors and geometry, making three major parts (and the preface) of what was to have constituted a grand Treatise on the World, other chapters of which he was forced to withhold when they were suddenly rendered obsolete by Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun.

  He begins his discussion of the eye with an optical diagram. ‘If it were possible to cut the eye in half without spilling the liquids with which it is filled, or any of its parts moving about, and the plane of the cross-section passing right through the middle of the pupil, it would appear as it is shown in this figure,’ he tells us. Already, it is interesting, in view of his philosophical subject matter, to note that Descartes is drawing our attention to something that, for the very good reasons he gives, could not actually be seen. The text that follows describes each of the parts that Descartes has labelled in his diagram – the hard outer skin of the eye, a loose second skin ‘hung like a tapestry’ inside the first, the optic nerve and its branches, which mingle with fine veins and arteries across the inner hemisphere of the eye in a fleshy third layer, and three zones of different transparent ‘slimes or humours’ filling the interior of the orb.