An Anatomy of Our Selves

Journalists are often compared to vultures. last week, as we circled the corpse Professor Gunther von Hagens splayed open in London's first public autopsy since the practice was banned 170 years ago, it was easy to see why. Around 250 of us showed up at the improvised anatomy theater in a former brewery in London's East End, easily outnumbering the 200 or so non-journalists who paid $19 a seat for the performance. The dissection was part of von Hagens's "Body Worlds" exhibition, which has been traveling around Europe displaying plasticized cadavers in athletic and "artistic" poses since 1997. With police threatening to shut down the event — several complaints are pending, so Von Hagens may yet be arrested — and some medical professionals calling it a travesty, we wanted sound bites of public outrage, or at least shock. We'd fallen into a Venus-flytrap of p.r., since anything we wrote would be more publicity for Von Hagens' one-man (and a lot of dead bodies) show. We didn't care; we knew a good story when we saw one.

Or so we thought. Unfortunately for our stories, the non-journalists in attendance seemed nonplussed. David Roberts, an Oxford physics student, was disappointed that the body was pickled in formaldehyde instead of fresh. "It's like going to Christmas dinner and just getting leftovers," he complained. Not everyone was so insouciant. One man covered his mouth and dashed for the toilet when Von Hagens made his first cuts through the cadaver's yellow, distended paunch. (The show's leading man was a prodigious whisky drinker and two-pack-a-day smoker.) Others found urgent reading material as Von Hagens sawed through the skull. Michael Wilks, chairman of the British Medical Association's Medical Ethics Committee, said the event and exhibition were "degrading and sensational rather than educational."

But can't education and sensationalism coexist? That's certainly the way it used to be. In 1543, the same year Copernicus published his revolutionary work, De Revolutionibus, Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius published De Fabrica, a massively popular work illustrated with scores of statuesque figures serenely posing on pedestals or frolicking in nature without their skin. Vesalius was among the first to bring new discoveries about the body to the general public, and just as Copernicus helped launch a new era in astronomy, Vesalius heralded the golden age of anatomy. People queued up at the public anatomy theaters opening all over Europe, and dissections became a spectacle no educated gentleman could miss. These autopsies were scientific, but the ornate theatrical setting blurred the line between performance and science.

The anatomical information revealed in these dissections spread beyond surgeons and doctors to influence the culture as a whole. Many writers of the period were fascinated by anatomies, and as they pushed the boundaries of self-referential writing they regularly described their efforts in the language of the body. "I have cut up mine own Anatomy," wrote John Donne, "dissected myself, and they are gone to read on me." This knowledge also gave writers a vocabulary that opened up new imaginative worlds. Donne describes the soul of a young girl, as it races through the stars and toward heaven, as "the pith, which, lest our bodies slack, / Strings fast the little bones of neck, and back; / So by the soul doth death string heaven and earth." Someone who hadn't seen a body dissected might have been able to draw the parallel, but probably not with the razor-sharp language that makes Donne one of the greats.

Von Hagens, who performed his autopsy under a copy of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp, is clearly conscious of this artistic heritage. That's why it was so disappointing to discover that Von Hagens is better at self-promotion than performance. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the corpse had more charisma than Von Hagens; a little more sensationalism would have been welcome. But while Von Hagens might not be the ideal person to resurrect the public autopsy in all its histrionic glory, his performance was a reminder of how the practice helped feed one of Europe's greatest periods of intellectual fervor.

Even though we were there to record the scandalized reactions of the crowd, many journalists spent the night craning to look at parts of ourselves that we had only pictured before in an abstract way. Is my liver really that big? And my brain that small? Could those two conditions possibly be related? I was fascinated by the corpse's gall bladder, an organ my doctor once threatened to remove, and which I had consequently associated only with pain and fear. Glistening, vibrantly colored and full of tiny, multifaceted stones, I now saw that it also had a strange beauty, displaying our bodies' perfect, if seldom seen, balance between fragility and resilience. And that's one sensation I wouldn't want to miss.