Leonardo's Foot

by Carol Ann Rinzler

  Is there an alternative? Well, they could switch to flatfoot dancing, named not for the foot, but for the way the foot moves. Flatfoot dancing is a step dance, a choreography in which the stamping, brushing, or tapping movement of the foot against the floor is used to produce rhythmic sounds in time with the tune, usually played on a fiddle. The dance, also known as Appalachian clogging, is similar to the Irish clog, not surprising given the Scotch–Irish ancestry of many of the original settlers in the North Carolina hills. The American version is more irregular than the Irish and more connected to the floor, the theory being that if your audience can see the soles of your feet, that’s not flatfoot dancing. And the New World clog is most commonly an individual performance rather than an ensemble such as Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, and Celtic Tiger, the clog-dance spectacles created, through odd coincidence or a really great cosmic joke, by an Irish-American dancer from Chicago named Michael Flatley.

  Meanwhile, back at the classic barre, you can sometimes find people with flatfeet sent there specifically to work their feet into arches. True, ballet can strengthen the muscles in the foot. And sometimes just being there yields unexpected benefits. As a girl, actress Jane Seymour had flatfeet and a speech impediment. “So I was immediately enrolled in ballet lessons to get rid of the flatfeet,” she says on her website, “and enrolled in speech classes, which of course ended up making me love the theatre.”

  But newly banana-ed feet?

  Alas, no. True arches are born, not made. They come with our genes.

  Virtually all human babies arrive with flatfeet. At birth, the tendons that hold the joints and bone in the foot together are loose, tightening only as an infant grows and the arch begins to form between twelve and eighteen months of age. By age three, the arch is usually firmly in place. Unless it isn’t: As adults, approximately 80 percent of us have arches; the other 20 percent don’t.

  Some people have flatfeet due to a congenital condition such as cerebral palsy which weakens muscles and tendons, including those in the arch. Others acquire their flatfeet later in life through normal aging, or after an injury that tears the posterior tibial tendon (the tissue that runs down the sole of the foot to hold the bones forming the arch firm) or an illness. This circumstance, quite reasonably labeled adult (acquired) flatfoot, is four times more common among older women (age fifty and up) than among men of the same age. Depending on the cause, the newly fallen arch may be either of no concern or serious enough to require a surgical fix.

  The most common flatfoot is a flexible one. Flexible flatfeet form an arch when you stand on your toes, but the arch disappears as soon as you stand down again on the whole foot. This type of flatfoot is often due to benign hypermobility joint syndrome (BHJS), a condition familiarly known as being “double jointed.” BHJS may run in families, perhaps along with curvature of the spine; a dislocated hip, elbow, knee, or shoulder; and/or frequent ankle or wrist sprains. Up to 40 percent of school age children, more frequently girls than boys, have BHJS bendable joints that allow them to fold a thumb down toward the arm, sometimes all the way down, or bend the other fingers (especially the pinky) back to touch the arm. Although that may make a child awesome in the schoolyard or on the gymnastics team, it may also lead to complaints of discomfort after activity, more commonly among younger children. By the teen years, most muscles and joints tend to tighten naturally, although children with BHJS who have flatfeet tend to have the same flatfeet as they grow older. But Nature may compensate: Sometimes people whose joints were hypermobile in childhood have fewer problems and better foot function in older age than those whose joints were always normally mobile.

  A foot that doesn’t arch when its owner stands on tiptoe is called a rigid flatfoot. Rigid flatness, which is less common than flexible flatness, is likely due to tarsal coalition, a condition in which the bones at the back of the foot are cemented together to create an abnormal connection between either the calcaneus (heel) and tarsal bones or the calcaneus and navicular bones, or less commonly, both the tarsal and the navicular bones. Experts at Boston Children’s Hospital say that a tarsal coalition may be “a genetic error in the dividing of embryonic cells that form the tarsal bones during fetal development” or that it may be “triggered by: trauma to the area, infection, self-fusion of a joint caused by advanced arthritis (rare in children).”

  So what’s a healthy arch? How high is high, and how flat is flat?

  In 2003, the National Institutes of Health funded the study Prevalence of Foot and Ankle Conditions in a Multiethnic Community Sample of Older adults. The researchers from the New England Research Institutes, Boston University’ School of Medicine, Sargent College, and the New England Baptist Hospital defined a high arch as one under which one of them could put two fingers when the person was standing. Of course, because fingers differ in width, this begs the question, “Whose fingers?”

  Another similarly “iffy” test asks you to stand a pair of your shoes on a flat surface, the left shoe on the left, the right shoe on the right, and see if they lean in toward each other. If they do, that suggests your feet are also leaning inward because your arches are not arched.

  And let us not forget the Wet Foot Test. For this one, you dunk your feet in water, stand on a piece of paper, step off, and look at the impression you left behind. Is there a blank space curving in from the pad behind your big toe toward your heel where your arch should lift your foot up off the paper? You have adequate arches. No blank space? Flatfeet, like the impression left by Robinson Crusoe’s accidental companion, Friday. “It happened one day, about noon,” Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe recalls, “going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked around me, I could hear nothing, nor see anything. I went up to a rising ground to look farther. I went up the shore, and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot - toes, heel, and every part of a foot (emphasis added).” No empty space. No arch.

  On the other hand, or foot, if the impression you leave behind shows only the heel and toes, that’s a foot with a high arch, known medically as pes cavus—from the Latin words pes meaning foot and cavus meaning hollow, as in the hollow space under the high arch. Would you be surprised to learn that like flat arches, high ones can also be annoying? Normal arches flatten slightly when a person is standing; high arches hold their distinct shape, robbing the foot of some of its weight-bearing potential and stressing the bones in the heel and the front of the foot. This discomfort may travel up the leg to the ankle, knee, and hip joints. Sometimes a person with pes cavus “clutches” at the floor with his toes; persistent clutching may lead to arched toes with calluses on top. Like flatfeet, high arches may run in families and are normally of no serious consequence. But if the arching occurs suddenly and affects only one foot, it may be a sign of a neurological disorder such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (a form of muscular dystrophy in which victims slowly lose the use of their arms and legs), Friedreich’s ataxia (a form of progressive nerve degeneration), or any one of several hereditary forms of progressive muscle and/or nerve damage, each of which requires a doctor’s care.

  Regardless of the arch, the soles of our feet are crime-fighting tools that can testify to our individual identity.

  Our mammalian skin has two top layers: the outermost epidermis and the dermis underneath. Under the dermis is a layer of fatty tissue containing sweat glands that secrete salty watery fluid and sebaceous glands that secrete oils to lubricate and protect the epidermis. When you touch something, these liquids leave behind an impression of the pattern formed by the ridges and furrows of the epidermis. This is the basis for the statement that “every contact leaves a trace,” a forensic dictum known as Lo
card’s Exchange Principle, named for Edmund Locard (1877–1966), director of the world’s very first crime laboratory, established in Lyons, France, in 1910 (the first such laboratory in the United States opened in Los Angeles in 1923). In 1920, Locard published L’enquete criminelle et les methodes scientifiques (The Criminal Investigation and the Scientific Method), a book in which he asserts that “wherever he [the criminal] steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves will serve as a silent witness against him.”

  That “witness” is wholly individual. No two human beings, not even identical twins, have exactly the same DNA or exactly the same foot- or hand- or fingerprint. The ridges, furrows, and minutia points (marks at the end of a ridge) on the surface of the skin that comprise fingerprint development in the womb, probably between the third and fifth month of fetal development, are with you forever. Many malefactors have tried to change their prints by burning or cutting their fingertips. It’s pretty much a waste of time. Slice the skin off the entire fingertip, and your body rushes in to repair the damage, the skin heals, and the patterns engraved during fetal life emerge once more. Cutting randomly into the tip may cause scarring that alters the basic print, but leaves either a recognizable partial print or creates a new print unique to you. Either way, the prints remain in place even after death when they continue to provide identification until the flesh itself decomposes and melts away.

  For a while in the 1990s, many American hospitals foot-printed newborns, ostensibly to prevent accidental mix-ups. The prints make nice souvenirs, but according to the FBI Criminal Justice Services Division, although the ridges that make up the newborn’s prints are fully developed, the feet, palms, and fingers are so small and the ridges so close together that the prints turn up as “blobs of ink” rather than distinct impressions. To get a print clear enough to serve as identification you must wait until the child is about five years old. By that time, the soles of the feet as well as the palms and the fingertips are large enough and the patterns of ridges and furrows sufficiently pronounced to make a useful impression. This may be one reason why The Infant Protection and Baby Switching Prevention Act—which includes footprinting among the security procedures to reduce the likelihood of infant patient abduction and baby switching and has been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives every year since 1999—has never moved out of committee to a vote by the full House.

  Adult footprints, like adult fingerprints, are fully formed. In 2011, scientists at Shinshu University in Tokida, Japan, used three-dimensional image-processing techniques to analyze the patterns of prints left by the footsteps of 104 volunteers when the heel hits, the foot rolls toward the toes, and the toes push off for the next step. The results were marks so distinct to an individual that footprints may rank alongside voice recognition, retinal scans, and of course fingerprints, as a tool for forensic identification. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719, more than a century before it was discovered that the footprint—not Friday’s plain flat impression on the sand, but a clear impression of lines on paper or some other background—is a characteristic as individual as our DNA. British research podiatrist Wesley Vernon, co-author of Forensic Podiatry, Principles and Methods (New York: Humana Press, 2011) considers the footprint scene the first example of forensic podiatry.

  For the moment, footprinted or not, most congenital flatfeet present no serious medical problem for either children or adults.

  But medicine is not sociology, nor is it religion.

  And therein trouble lurks.

  The discriminating drama of the different foot

  If our own culture had evolved under different circumstances, say on the African continent rather than in Western Europe, our standards of Otherness might be tall Eastern African versus broader more muscular Western African versus the much shorter Central African pygmy and various shades of black, brown, and tan with the norm and the Other depending, as usual, on who came in first in the wars, cultural, and otherwise—that is, the ones with weapons. But Westerners are, for good or ill, mostly the heirs of those dreaded “Dead White Males,” European men who over the centuries wrote our literature and our music, created our pictures and statues, and created the laws by which we live. As a result, our differences, for good or ill, have usually been those things that separate the Western European from the rest of the world.

  The exception is women, proving that you don’t have to be in the minority to be an outsider. From the beginning, although they have always represented at least half and sometimes more than half the population, women have consistently been defined by the men who wrote the rule books as “not us.” Or as Aristotle put it: “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.” For Aristotle the moralist, the “defects” included the “facts” that women had fewer teeth than men and that only fair-skinned women experienced orgasm. Shame on him. Even worse, the quote does not appear in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Shame on them.

  As for men, the Vitruvian Man’s is not the only ideal body. The ideal Buddhist body is described in the Pali Canon, the first written version of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–4 to 483 [or 411 or 400]). The Canon is one version of the Tripitaka (Sanskrit for three baskets) comprising the Vinaya that teaches conduct, the Sutra that concerns meditation, and the Abhidharma that deals with the totality of human knowledge. Considered too sacred to be committed to writing, these words were not written down until the first century. They were kept alive by monks who for five centuries memorized and chanted them to the next generation. The Canon lists thirty-two characteristics of a Great Man including his foot, which is equal in length to its partner with a sole engraved with netlike lines that make it extraordinarily flexible (ordinary human beings with only two or three of these lines can just move their feet up and down), tube-shape toes all equal in length, smooth toenails that turn slight up at the tip, oval (not round) heel. And of course, a distinct arch, the preference set more than 400 years before Vitruvius even saw the light of day. The other signs of a Great Man are, “Long, slender fingers, Pliant hands and feet, full sized heels, Thighs like a royal stag, Full round shoulders, Hands reaching below the knees, Well-retracted male organ, Height and stretch of arms equal, Every hair-root dark colored, Body hair graceful and curly, Golden-hued body, Ten-foot aura around him. Soft, smooth skin, Soles, palms, shoulders, and crown of head well-rounded, area below armpits well-filled, Lion-shaped body. Body erect and upright, Full, round shoulders, Forty teeth, Teeth white, even, and close, Four canine teeth pure white, Jaw like a lion, Saliva that improves the taste of all food, Tongue long and broad, Voice deep and resonant, Eyes deep blue, Eyelashes like a royal bull, White curl [a spiral or circular dot] that emits light between eyebrows, Fleshy protuberance on the crown of the head.”

  For centuries after his death, the Buddha’s followers considered it sacrilegious to produce full images of him. One acceptable alternative appears to have been a footprint, actually, a model showing the bottom of the foot. The surface was often decorated with Buddhist symbols such as the 1,000-spoke wheel representing the thousand teachings of the Buddha and the swastika (from the Sanskrit words su meaning well and asti meaning to be), a universal symbol of life and health even older than the Egyptian symbol of life, the ankh. Early on, the clockwise (arms facing right) swastika and its opposite, the counterclockwise sauvistika, were interchangeable, but then the Nazis appropriated the clockwise swastika as their own, turning it into a symbol of death.

  Christians embraced the arched foot in 325 when the Emperor Constantine (c. 272–337) convened the Council of Nicea one year after declaring Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. As conquerors often do, Constantine immediately set about sacking the losers’ Greek and Roman temples and attempting to discredit the ancient pagan gods.

  One particular target was Pan. The Greek word pan means all, and although Zeus was the King of the Olympian gods,
Pan—often called The Great God Pan—was the protector of all things natural and wild. Half man, half goat, with hoofs and horns, Pan was musical and sexual, so much so that his name was used to characterize states of emotional excess: panic and pandemonium (the god’s name plus the Greek word daimon meaning evil spirit). Naturally, this made him extremely popular, reason enough for the Christians to turn him into the model for their Devil, his cloven hoofs the Devil’s feet. One unintended consequence of this fascination with the Devil’s foot was a skeptical view of shoes and shoemakers. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates names shoemakers as one group of tradesmen required to satisfy the “bodily wants” of citizens of the ideal state, but in Medieval Europe, people considered foot coverings (and the people who made them) suspicious because they could hide a cloven hoof. Or a flatfoot, considered an equally suspicious mark of a disciple of Pan. Eventually, the boisterous and joyful Greek deity was transformed into the patron of witches and visible flatfeet into a clear mark of allegiance to Pan that came in handy when nominating candidates for burning.

  Eventually, people pushed the significance of various body parts beyond folklore into the realm of pseudo-science, proposing entire classification systems that would make it easy to identify superior and inferior races, as well as exemplary or dangerous individuals, by their physical characteristics, head to toe.