Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Duncan’s remarkable work includes inspirations from woodcut medieval maps and paintings by the Bruegels as well as more conventional motifs from the culture of tattoo traditionally prevalent among seamen and prison inmates. The people who seek him out are not the kind who want a tattoo – or the transferred-on illusion of one – for reasons of fashion. ‘My customers are more concerned about changing themselves. They are people in a state of change, and this is a very visible one. I have seen people liberated,’ he tells me. He does not see it as part of his job to ask why a person wants a particular design or what some foreign script means. The psychotherapy is in acquiring the mark. As in supposedly remote or primitive cultures, a tattoo marks a rite of passage. There are plenty of reasons not to be tattooed: the permanence, the time-consuming process of getting it done, the pain involved, the breaking of the skin. All these barriers become part of the rationale. ‘They will have thought that these are not strong enough reasons to stop them going ahead.’

  For these people, as for those who engage in the cutting medically classified as ‘self-harm’, and even perhaps for some who undergo cosmetic surgery, pain is an essential part of the experience. These actions seem to be secular versions of the mortification of the flesh. Mortification of the flesh, which is a traditional feature of many religions, may take a number of forms, most commonly degrees of fasting, but more extreme forms involve the creation of visible scars through actions such as self-flagellation or pulling on strings tied to hooks in the skin. Pain is experienced as an emphatic aspect of the self-denial of normal pleasures, while the scars are the conspicuous public sign of the celebrant’s piousness. In today’s secular equivalent, these things seem to reflect a desire for felt existence in a world where the regulated environment of civilization does so much to numb our senses, and to be a desperate assertion of identity, transforming the skin that we have been given by nature and that is recognized by authority and reinscribing it as our own. The skin is, as always, our most sensitive means of interaction with the world, and yet somehow still seems to be the barrier to our deeper immersion in it.

  With this, we sense that we have reached a kind of limit. We stand at last on the shore of our island selves. And yet. ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’ the science historian Donna Haraway demands to know in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, a polemical appeal to re-imagine our existence free of the fetters of gender, race and all the other social conventions that advertise themselves on the fleshy surface of the human body. Haraway notes that the shell has already been breached: we already invite into our bodies ‘other beings encapsulated by skin’ through xenotransplantation of tissue from animals such as pigs and monkeys and even injections, such as of the botulinum bacteria used in cosmetic Botox treatments. These dermal forays can be read as signs of our urge to explore beyond the boundary of the skin. Is homo clausus finally opening up? If so, what delights – and what dangers – await us? These are the possibilities we shall explore in the final chapter of Anatomies.

  PART THREE

  The Future

  Extending the Territory

  What is it that the kids from Fame sing? ‘I’m gonna live for ever / I’m gonna learn how to fly.’ It’s not that they really plan to do either of these things, of course. For them, it’s more about the feeling of being in the physical, performative moment. And yet, there are, somewhere deep in us, those earnest wishes. We admire what the body can do, and still wish it could do more. We dream of extension – of our physical capabilities, of our sense perceptions, of the span of our brief lives. Curiously, this desire is directed chiefly towards our corporeal selves. Our minds are untouched by it; for some reason, we do not yearn for greater wisdom or imagination in quite the same way.

  Such dreams are not new. We may be created in God’s image, but our gods we imagine as super-able versions of ourselves. Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, has two pairs of arms, while Brahma also has four heads. Besting both of them, Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion of East Asian Buddhism, has eleven heads and a thousand arms. The Greek fertility god Priapus and his Egyptian counterpart, Min, have permanent erections. The Greek mother goddess Artemis sports multiple breasts.

  The Metamorphoses of Ovid heads a vast literature demonstrating that the human urge to improve or transform the body, or to exchange one body for another, is both strong and constant. The theme continues through powerful stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the fairy tales collected and added to in the nineteenth century, such as the Brothers Grimm’s ‘The Frog Prince’. Today’s Hollywood blockbusters have revived the genre with the help of realistic computer graphic imagery. The character transformations in these stories may be offered as a salutary lesson or moral to the audience, as with the appearance of the stone guest in the Don Juan legend, whose unexpected movement warns that the Don will not go unpunished for his sins, or they may be personally liberating and capable of altering social perceptions, as in the Shrek films. Either way, they are life-changing events.

  All technologies are, in Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, ‘extensions of man’. Often, it seems, our desire is for greater powers of destruction. When we dream of extending the capabilities of the hand, for example, it is often a weapon we wish to add, as we are reminded when we see a child blow the imaginary smoke away from the finger he has just used to shoot his friend. ‘My right arm is complete again,’ exults the murderous barber Sweeney Todd as he wields his beloved razors in Stephen Sondheim’s musical. But a similar technological extension to human capability serves a more benign purpose in Edward Scissorhands. Tim Burton’s film derives from traditional archetypes such as ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in which inventors create mutant living creatures, and in particular from the German story of Struwwelpeter, a cautionary tale about a boy who never cuts his nails or combs his hair. The story follows the conventional path as Edward is initially misunderstood before performing wonders and finally being accepted for what he is. It shows how physical extension can lead swiftly to a more complete personal transformation.

  Whereas Ovid relied on changes in natural types, metamorphosis now takes a technological form. Both natural and artificially assisted transformations, however, show our commitment to the never-ending invention of our own bodies. With the rise of biotechnology, we can expect to see a convergence of these two worlds, the mechanical and the organic, and a closer integration between our natural bodies and the features with which we extend them.

  As McLuhan observes, our technological extensions demand our obeisance. Our bodies must become their servant if in turn they are to be useful to us. I am curious to learn how this works in real life. To find out, I have arranged to see Jody Cundy, a multiple gold medallist in the British Paralympic team. He was formerly a world-champion swimmer but now enjoys a no less exalted status as a cyclist. At birth, his right leg had no ankle or foot, finishing with two toes at the end of his shin bone. He now uses a variety of prosthetic legs, with special high-performance versions made of carbon-fibre for use in competition. This is one degree of extension. Jody’s bike, also made of carbon-fibre, is another. It is his body plus his artificial leg plus the bike that together are able to achieve record-breaking speeds. I am intrigued to know where ‘Jody’ stops and technology takes over.

  I arrive at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester, where the athletes are in training for the 2012 Paralympic Games. A large banner outside the velodrome reads: ‘Chasing immortality’. Jody has tousled strawberry-blond hair and an uncomplicated, outgoing manner. It is no surprise to learn that when he is not on the track he earns a living by giving motivational talks.

  Jody was fitted for his first prosthetic limb at the age of three. Then, every six months as he grew up, a new fitting would be required. At first, these were elaborate metal contraptions which had to be strapped to the thigh by means of a kind of leather corset and around the waist with a belt. ‘Dad would have a toolkit of stuff to fit the legs,’ Jody remembers. Today’s attachment
is a great improvement. It has a socket custom-shaped to match the tapering stump below Jody’s knee and a lubricated silicone liner to create an airtight seal. ‘The only time I’ve had a leg I don’t really feel is with these latest ones where the fit is so good,’ he says.

  Jody started cycling as part of a regime of complementary fitness training for his swimming. But then one day a coach spotted him going round the track and thought he looked a natural. He made the difficult decision to change events and never looked back. ‘I went from complete novice to standing on a podium in about eighteen months,’ he tells me, as he nonchalantly changes his ‘walking’ leg for a cycling version, which has an integral clip to lock it into the cycle pedal.

  After a brief chat with his coach about the programme for the day – perhaps to try a few starts and a few accelerations – he is set off on forty laps of warm-up. A motorcycle sets the pace, and the cyclists follow close behind in its slipstream. Jody turns in lap times of twenty-six seconds. The pace seems leisurely, but I calculate that he is already moving at more than thirty kilometres per hour. By the time the last lap comes round, he’ll be doing sixty. During what the athletes call an ‘effort’, he can reach seventy kilometres per hour.

  Jody’s normal left leg is exceptionally well developed, as one would expect for a competition cyclist. His calf resembles a plump ham. The prosthetic limb next to it may be sculpted to look like a natural leg (though without the exaggerated musculature), but it does not work quite like one. The differences mean that Jody must use his body differently from other cyclists, and must think differently in order to produce the required actions. A track cyclist normally uses the hinge of the ankle and muscles in the lower leg to bring the pedal back up from the bottom of each circular orbit (the foot being strapped to the pedal). Because his right leg lacks a normally pivoting ankle, however, Jody must instead use a group of muscles in his hip (collectively known as the iliopsoas) to produce this lift. The prosthesis does not give him any power advantage. If anything, Jody feels that it is his normal left leg that is inexhaustible, simply because it is always the right that gives out first, limited by the strength not of the muscles in the calf but of the quadriceps in his upper right leg. Laboratory tests show that, although it tires first, Jody’s right iliopsoas is in fact stronger than his left because of the particular action required of it to compensate for the fact that he has no muscles at all below the knee.

  For most of us, cycling is something that we do without thinking. But Jody has to think about it, both in order to improve his performance and in relation to his disability. When he pushes down with his left leg, Jody explains, ‘you’ve got this whole unit that wants to do stuff. Whereas on the right, I’ve got this motion’ – he awkwardly hinges his hip and lifts up his thigh. ‘It’s almost as if I’m trying to hold on to the inside of the leg when I come up. The hardest part is getting through the bottom of the pedal. I struggle with top and bottom dead centre. I don’t feel I am getting any power.’ These are the points in the cycling action where the ankle would normally hinge and the muscles of the lower leg would be most busy. This is especially important at the start of an event. In training, Jody’s strategy for this is to ‘trick the body into learning to do it quickly’, and then to be able to repeat the trick as he moves progressively on to harder exercises, which he does by repeatedly swapping the single gear on his track bike for gears of a higher ratio.

  Jody’s main event is the one-kilometre time trial, for which he won gold at the Beijing Paralympic Games, in a time of 1 minute, 5.47 seconds. It is a difficult distance for physiological reasons, being long enough that the body begins to suffer, and lactate, a product of the breakdown of glucose that provides energy, builds up painfully in the muscles. Because so much blood is drawn to his legs during the event, Jody finds he has to lie down immediately afterwards in order to restore his balance. ‘You can’t imagine doing it much more without passing out,’ he says with feeling. His remark reminds me of Emma Redding’s dance-based exploration of the point of exhaustion.

  Jody’s sense of his own body alters when he is cycling. Normally, his body envelope is defined by his natural biology: it ends where his body stops, at the literal limits of his physique. His left leg stops at the toes, but his right stops just below the knee. But when he’s wearing his artificial limb, which weighs a lot less than a lower leg of flesh and bone, he says he feels that weight disproportionately because it is an inert attachment; it makes his leg as a whole feel a bit like a pendulum. At low speeds, Jody can feel the difference in his legs. When he is cycling at speed, however, his body envelope expands to include the carbon-fibre prosthesis and even his bike, which weighs just under seven kilogrammes. ‘It never feels like something’s on the end of the stump,’ he tells me. ‘And with the leg being made of the same material as my bike, you have this feeling of the leg and the bike being one and the same. You feel it most when you’re accelerating, and the sensation of all the force that’s being applied to my prosthetic leg is making its way seamlessly to the back wheel. It’s an amazing feeling.’

  It had been convenient for me to use my own bicycle to get from central Manchester to the velodrome. As I ride away, the sun is shining. My less-than-fit self and my low-tech bike hardly add up to a harmony of man and machine. My speed is a modest fraction of Jody’s. The experience for me is more about being out in the air, moving with freedom through the cityscape, an extended capability as close to flying as most of us ever get without artificial power.

  In the promised era of self-transformation – biological, technological, psychological, chemical – how do we really feel about the extension of our own body’s capabilities? Should extension be clearly artificial, or should it ideally be indistinguishable from the host body, united in one integral organism? Before we take a position one way or the other, it is perhaps worth remembering that the distinction is already far from clear. As one bioethicist drily notes, even those prone to object that we would no longer be our natural selves through such intervention tend to be ‘folk who wear eyeglasses, use insulin, have artificial hips’.

  One of the most prevalent images we have of entities that can both fly and live for ever are angels. Where I live in East Anglia, they are pinned in their dozens to the roofs of its great churches like butterflies in collectors’ drawers. They represent a state of being that is inaccessible to embodied humans, yet so obviously one that we would like to inhabit and experience for ourselves. The means of attachment of the wings seems to reflect this ambiguity. In strictly anatomical terms, it is hardly viable. The wings usually sprout from the shoulder blades – perhaps the jutting part of this bone suggested to the artists who first developed such images a missing avian appendage – but there is never a hint of the bulky musculature that would be necessary to drive them. They represent the idea of flight, but no realistic prospect of it.

  Wisely, artists seldom choose to depict angels actually flying. Indeed, the Bible provides only one such glimpse (when Daniel sees ‘the man Gabriel . . . being caused to fly swiftly’), and in general is ambivalent about angels’ need for wings at all. When paintings and sculptures show wings, they are clearly borrowed from birds and magnified proportionally. As extensions of man, though, they fail every practical test because the artists never augment the bone and muscle in a way that makes physiological sense. Instead, they should really be seen as emblems of divine power. As the author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis observed: ‘Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know.’

  Whereas angels have human form and superhuman powers, robots are technological devices with human powers. After all, they are designed for the most part to do jobs that we would rather not
. But to carry out human tasks does not necessarily require a human form. Strange to find, then, that in the burgeoning robotics research community, there is still an unaccountable fondness not only for modelling these devices very literally on what humans can do, and the way they do it, but also for giving them human likeness. I read, for example, of projects to create robots that will be able to push wheelchairs. This seems to miss the point: surely the answer is an ‘intelligent’ wheelchair, rather than a conventional wheelchair with a second human-like machine to push it along. In Karel Čapek’s R. U. R., I might add, the robots take on human form, but only because their creator ‘hadn’t a shred of humor about him’. In our literal way, we are driven to fashion both angels and robots in our likeness because human form provides the most compelling vehicle for describing human aspirations.

  At the moment, robots amuse us because they look so unnatural in their mimicking of our actions. In the future, if the technological dreamers get their way, they will look so human that it will be no laughing matter. Uncanny Valley is the place where humans begin to feel genuinely uneasy at something’s ability to appear human when it is not. This ‘valley’ is, in fact, a trough in a line graph that plots human enthusiasm for robots against their increasing human likeness. The line begins high while it is perfectly clear that robots are just machines. But shortly before they become so realistic that we can no longer tell whether they are human or not, there is a dip – a stage when they simply appear very creepy. Other strange creations already populate Uncanny Valley – Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad, for example, with its pallid ‘skin’ and body hair, or the ultra-realistic dolls known as ‘reborns’ that women sometimes carry as a substitute for a baby that has grown up or one that never arrived. We are fast approaching the point where we will have to decide whether we are going to pass through Uncanny Valley and increasingly share our lives with such creations or turn back.