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were always being held up for scrutiny by their social betters. In those days, anatomists had to work fast to avoid the deliquescence of the body. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–90) was already recommending the use of alcohol to preserve tissues, but it was ceroplasty, or wax modelling, as developed in northern Italy—especially Florence—in the seventeenth century, that became the prized method; Gaetano Zummo’s technique was brought to a fine art under the abbot Felice Fontana (1730–1805), who was able to convince artists and anatomists to work together on his waxes. Ceroplasty was a highly skilled procedure requiring an intermixture of purified bees’ wax and spermaceti, as hardener, which was then pigmented to the desired hue; special techniques such as dipping silk threads in hot wax were used to achieve the effect of fine structures—that of the lymphatic vessels or nerves for instance. Fontana’s waxes were shown to great acclaim in 1780, when he was commissioned to prepare a series of obstetrical specimens for the Emperor Joseph II: these can still be seen in glass cases, as a permanent exhibit, in the palatial Josephinum in Vienna. It was hoped that they would educate Viennese doctors in the use of forceps as advocated by two pioneering Scots, Hunter and Smellie; Tristram Shandy, written at about the same time, descants knowingly on the optimal fulcrum placement of this new technology for use by man-midwives. Along with gross anatomy, or the study of the body as it presents itself to the naked eye, wax models were an important means of advancing the evidence of things seen when so many concepts in medicine had been hitherto deductive, reasoning from the general to the particular. To understand the body, the body was enough—it is a very modern thought. Prior to William of Ockham, who is generally credited with giving primacy to the particular over the universal, that modern clincher ‘whose body is it anyway?’ would have been an inconceivable thought. Indeed, to have a body (a possession rather than an attribute, something like Locke’s ‘first property’, extending its domain by assimilating what it can grasp) would have been a novel and disturbing heresy five centuries ago. Visiting Melanesia in the 1940s, the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt was startled to be told by an elder that the Europeans had ‘brought them the body’. Perhaps it was the body itself, as Durkheim 8  A Doctor’s Dictionary
page 21
suggested, that served to organise the personality. But the epistemological strain is evident enough: after the Middle Ages, an anchorite contempt for the flesh allies itself with the Cartesian doubt that underwrites modern analytical medicine; the body loses its place in the great panpsychia of the cosmos, and the very idea of its incarnating the divine comes to seem absurdly aggrandizing. What is universal in man is now a sign. Ceroplasty and the vascular injection of fixatives and dyes remained mainstays for teaching anatomical structure into the twentieth century. There is clearly a difference between the two methods: the first is an imitation of nature, a distancing technique, the other an attempt to preserve the corruptible body. This was not to spare the anatomist’s feelings; it was to protect him from the dangers of putrefaction. The lifelikeness of prepared wax specimens can be such as to acquire a ‘terrorizing’ quality, as Gonzalez-Crussi puts it, although the technique met with Goethe’s approval: his youthful enthusiasm for anatomy classes in Strasbourg in 1770 gave way to a suspicion that anatomists were cads of the worst kind. On the other hand, it is probably more accurate to say that what most medical students remember of their dissection classes is not a feeling of horror at having to cut up a body but an anticlimactic sense of how grey and shrunken the fixed cadaver is. The illustrations from Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica ranged in the museum outside the dissection room at Glasgow University were more disturbing than the cadavers inside: even when subject to terrible violence—flensed like Marsyas or hanging by a cord to keep their jaws shut—Vesalius’ studies insist on comporting themselves in unmistakably lifelike ways: outrage is made complete, Baudelaire suggests in his poem ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’, by their being ‘tricked out to look like hired hands’. Tool, image, grave: the three artifacts that take the measure of, and surpass, our ordinary human condition are assembled in the poem, yet Baudelaire’s slave labourer goes on digging even after he has cut the turf for his grave, refusing to move into the immaterial. Concerning Vesalius’ series, Roger Caillois remarked in his essay ‘Au Cœur du Fantastique’ that ‘more genuine mystery crops up in such documents, in which precision is of the essence, than in the wildest inventions of Hieronymus Bosch.’ B | bodies  9

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were always being held up for scrutiny by their social betters.

In those days, anatomists had to work fast to avoid the deliquescence of the body. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–90) was already recommending the use of alcohol to preserve tissues, but it was ceroplasty, or wax modelling, as developed in northern Italy—especially Florence—in the seventeenth century, that became the prized method; Gaetano Zummo’s technique was brought to a fine art under the abbot Felice Fontana (1730–1805), who was able to convince artists and anatomists to work together on his waxes.

Ceroplasty was a highly skilled procedure requiring an intermixture of purified bees’ wax and spermaceti, as hardener, which was then pigmented to the desired hue; special techniques such as dipping silk threads in hot wax were used to achieve the effect of fine structures—that of the lymphatic vessels or nerves for instance. Fontana’s waxes were shown to great acclaim in 1780, when he was commissioned to prepare a series of obstetrical specimens for the Emperor Joseph II: these can still be seen in glass cases, as a permanent exhibit, in the palatial Josephinum in Vienna. It was hoped that they would educate Viennese doctors in the use of forceps as advocated by two pioneering Scots, Hunter and Smellie; Tristram Shandy, written at about the same time, descants knowingly on the optimal fulcrum placement of this new technology for use by man-midwives. Along with gross anatomy, or the study of the body as it presents itself to the naked eye, wax models were an important means of advancing the evidence of things seen when so many concepts in medicine had been hitherto deductive, reasoning from the general to the particular.

To understand the body, the body was enough—it is a very modern thought. Prior to William of Ockham, who is generally credited with giving primacy to the particular over the universal, that modern clincher ‘whose body is it anyway?’ would have been an inconceivable thought. Indeed, to have a body (a possession rather than an attribute, something like Locke’s ‘first property’, extending its domain by assimilating what it can grasp) would have been a novel and disturbing heresy five centuries ago. Visiting Melanesia in the 1940s, the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt was startled to be told by an elder that the Europeans had ‘brought them the body’. Perhaps it was the body itself, as Durkheim

8  A Doctor’s Dictionary

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