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Summary
Summary
The human body is the most fraught and fascinating, talked-about and taboo, unique yet universal fact of our lives. It is the inspiration for art, the subject of science, and the source of some of the greatest stories ever told. In Anatomies, acclaimed author of Periodic Tales Hugh Aldersey-Williams brings his entertaining blend of science, history, and culture to bear on this richest of subjects.In an engaging narrative that ranges from ancient body art to plastic surgery today and from head to toe, Aldersey-Williams explores the corporeal mysteries that make us human: Why are some people left-handed and some blue-eyed? What is the funny bone, anyway? Why do some cultures think of the heart as the seat of our souls and passions, while others place it in the liver?A journalist with a knack for telling a story, Aldersey-Williams takes part in a drawing class, attends the dissection of a human body, and visits the doctor's office and the morgue. But Anatomies draws not just on medical science and Aldersey-Williams's reporting. It draws also on the works of philosophers, writers, and artists from throughout history. Aldersey-Williams delves into our shared cultural heritage--Shakespeare to Frankenstein, Rembrandt to 2001: A Space Odyssey--to reveal how attitudes toward the human body are as varied as human history, as he explains the origins and legacy of tattooing, shrunken heads, bloodletting, fingerprinting, X-rays, and more.From Adam's rib to van Gogh's ear to Einstein's brain, Anatomies is a treasure trove of surprising facts and stories and a wonderful embodiment of what Aristotle wrote more than two millennia ago: "The human body is more than the sum of its parts."
Author Notes
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is an author and journalist from the United Kingdom. Aldersey-Williams was educated at Highgate School and studied the natural sciences at the University of Cambridge. he is known for his bestselling book, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc, which explains all the elements found in the periodic table and their origins. He has also written The Most Beautiful Molecule and Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mixing biology, art, literature, and pop culture from the ancient past up to the present, Aldersey-Williams (The Most Perfect Molecule) provides an enlightening and thoroughly engaging view of the human body. Although he divides the corpus into part-specific chapters, Aldersey-Williams avoids a reductionist view of the subject, reflecting instead on how our components come together to make us fully human. Along the way he relates myriad humorous, informative, and provocative stories-in the chapter on flesh, he describes the "autocannibalism" of food critic Stefan Gates, who "converted fat extracted from his body by liposuction into glycerol for use in icing a cake, which he then proceeded to eat." He also apprises readers of how to make a shrunken head, and describes "a new kind of love token" being pioneered by artist Tobie Kerridge: "rings made from the bone tissue of their partner." He also explains why it's not uncommon to find subjects with two left feet in paintings, the science behind facial recognition, and the skeletal demands of ballet. From the dissection laboratory to a live-model drawing class, Aldersey-Williams illuminates the contours of the human body from head to toe. 16 illus. Agent: Antony Topping, Greene & Heaton (U.K.) (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Aldersey-Williams has previously written about buckminsterfullerene (The Most Beautiful Molecule, 1995) and chemical elements (Periodic Tales, 2011). Here he works as a geographer, inspecting the territory of the body while merging medical science with art, literature, history, and philosophy. Anatomic superstars Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, and Henry Gray bask in the spotlight, but they share the stage with the likes of Karel Capek, Gogol, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rembrandt, and Hieronymus Bosch. The book is crammed with curiosities: the recipe for shrinking and preserving a human head, body-snatchers, phrenology, synesthesia (a sort of mingling of the senses), and Einstein's brain. Aldersey-Williams has us think about the variety of body parts that have infiltrated common idioms: elbow grease, nose around, fight tooth and nail. The enjoyable and unpredictable text is sprinkled with illustrations and concludes with musings on self-transformation (expanding the body's abilities and extending lifespan). The Greek philosopher Epictetus once warned, You are a little soul carrying around a corpse. Whether a work of art, a biological machine, the epitome of evolution, or a cold cadaver, the human body is astonishing.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR a species so pleased with its own brain, we are surprisingly ambivalent about the rest of our body. We tend to admire other people's bodies, especially if they're Olympians or shirtless Russian presidents, but most of us are constantly seeking to improve our own by starving or stuffing, injecting, waxing, straightening, piercing, lifting and squeezing. In 2010 in the United States alone, we spent $10 billion on cosmetic surgery, and that's not including Brazilian Blowouts. We are also deeply uncomfortable with the bodily aspects of being human. Our brains light up in weird and remarkable ways at the sight of blood or fecal matter as if these werenlt, in fact, perfectly mundane. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams points out in "Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body," even television cartoons portray the skin as a rubbery and impregnable barrier. Weapons and falling objects dent it or merely bounce off it You never see Elmer Fudd hemorrhaging through the jugular. Prudery doesn't really explain our discomfort, but Aldersey-Williams hints at what might, namely fear. We fear the fragility, illness and suffering that are native to our corporeality. In "Anatomies," he seeks to study the body full-on, frontally. He tells us straightaway that he knew nothing about anatomy when he started. A science writer and art critic, he's interested in the intersection of science and culture. He thinks we should know our bodies, but he's less interested in telling us how they work than in exploring how they've been perceived through art This approach yields some fine rewards, but also some significant limitations, particularly if your lens is, like AlderseyWilliams's, overwhelmingly Western European. He is astute on gender bias in body perception, describing, for example, how the clitoris was wholly left out of many anatomy texts, including modern ones, which makes his silence on his Eurocentric approach perplexing. (O.K., since you're wondering: some anatomists really thought the clitoris didn't exist. Vesalius, who wrote a definitive anatomy text in 1543, told a colleague, Falloppio, "You can hardly ascribe this new and useless part, as if it were an organ, to healthy women," insisting that it was found only in "women hermaphrodites.") We hear about Thomas Hardy's description of eyes, Nabokov's synesthesia (he saw colors when he read letters of the alphabet) and van Eyck's meticulously rendered wart on the ear of a canon (the 1436 portrait survives, but the wart mysteriously disappeared). Some of these anecdotes feel thin, but things pick up when Aldersey-Williams describes characters who get deeper under our skin. The dawn of modern anatomy began with Vesalius, who picked up where the Greek physician Galen had left off 1,400 years earlier, and continued through Rabelais, the bawdy author, monk and anatomist, and Leonardo da Vinci, a skilled amateur anatomist, among so many other things. It was Leonardo who illustrated the divine proportions of the "Vitruvian Man." (Less well known is that he discovered the human heart has four chambers.) But the golden age of anatomy belongs to the 17th and 18th centuries. That's when the British physician William Harvey discovered from (gruesome) animal vivisections that blood is recirculated rather than made anew. Harvey was working at a time when fresh dead bodies were hard to come by. He was so determined to find specimens that he dissected his own father and sister. Criminals could be legally dissected after execution, but females were rare. One anatomist, William Hunter, is believed to have acquired pregnant bodies through devious means, possibly murder; another, Robert Knox, bought at least 16 cadavers from a pair of ruffians who lured docile loners into their lodgings, plied them with whiskey and suffocated them. In a satisfying resolution, one of the murderers was himself dissected. Sadly, as Aldersey-Williams points out, we've lost touch with some of the scientific legacy afforded by these investigations, including the intricate wax impressions and drawings of our glandular systems. Instead we are seduced now by specialty medicine, molecules and DNA, and medical schools teach far less anatomy than they used to. "The emphasis now is on the detail, not the whole," he writes. For many of us, those details "miss the point." DNA "doesn't tell us about ourselves in the round." What does tell us about the merging of the human heart and mind is, of course, art. Even lowbrow art. AlderseyWilliams spends a whole page on Milton Glaser's "IΨ NY" marketing campaign. "Anatomies" is a loose-limbed series of historical and artistic anecdotes, some interwoven with first-person reporting that can feel a bit random. For a section on bones, Aldersey-Williams sits in on an art class at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, "the only art school in the country that requires its students to draw from anatomy," where he excellently describes a cadaver head as "like a gargoyle." In a perfect image, he writes that the drawings in Vesalius's 1543 text showed skin draped off dissected bodies like Dalí clocks. His prose is often fresh, and some details are revelatory. All of a slight young woman's bones, he writes, weigh less than nine pounds. Who knew that bloodletting actually worked sometimes, at least temporarily, as in patients with hypertension? Unfortunately, George Washington's physician was too fond of it, and the practice did in the father of our country. CULTURE, though, is more than painting and literature and the occasional hip film reference; it's also psychology, social history and commentary. And anthropology, with its attention to non-Western beliefs and practices. Aldersey-Williams is fascinated by a tattoo artist called Dùncan X, but passes over the opportunity for a broader discussion of the universal human drive to embellish our bodies. There is no discussion here of traditional ritualistic cutting, plugs or piercings and only a glancing reference to modern boob jobs. In fact, AlderseyWilliams somewhat perplexingly passes over a discussion of breasts and penises, surely two of the more interesting organs we possess and about which, really, we all have much to learn. In his pursuit of other bodily geography, Aldersey-Williams discusses the foot, especially the big toe, with a ballerina; recalls a brain scan; reviews a recipe for shrinking heads (it sounds a bit like cooking cabbage); and interviews an "immortalist," who is convinced the key to living forever is to solve a few technical glitches in our cells. Since we value our minds so far above our bodies, it's perhaps inevitable that some futurists envision total freedom from corporeality, in which our souls become more like hard drives thunking along in perpetuity. But Aldersey-Williams's book reminds us that we shouldn't abandon the ship so fast, that perhaps it is because of our flawed, precious, uncomfortable physicality that our souls are rich and knowing in the first place. Florence Williams is the author of "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.
Choice Review
The parts of the human body and their function as well as people's concern for their bodies--other than in the context of illness/health and appearance--are probably not generally considered as contributing to the prevalent culture. In this highly informative, readable treatise, Aldersey-Williams, a British free-lance science writer (e.g., Periodic Tales, CH, Oct'11, 49-0861), brings attention to aspects of culture directly related to human anatomy on the basis that "it is through our body that that we sense the world and must interact with it." The introduction and prologue describe the author's approach to the subject matter, establishing the background for the remainder of the work. The underlying theme follows Aristotle's adage that "the whole is greater than the sum of it parts." Part 1, "The Whole," includes chapters titled "Flesh" and "Bones." Part 2, "The Parts," contains chapters on various body parts, e.g., brain, head, heart, stomach, and foot. The author's coverage includes personal observation, myths, history, philosophy, medicine, and more. The exceptional quality of this work makes it valuable for every readership level. It should be required supplemental reading for any anatomy course since it adds a perspective not currently provided in standard courses. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. S. Kowalczyk formerly, University of Michigan
Guardian Review
From the cover, Anatomies looks as if it should be filed under "humour", with its cartoon diagrams and fig-leafed Michelangelo. Yet although Aldersey-Williams puts himself in potentially comic situations - an art class with nudes, a blood donor centre, a tattoo parlour - Anatomies is a serious work, the author's attempt to address his self-confessed ignorance of his body's workings. But when he does stumble into a functional explanation of, say, the bladder or the workings of the inner ear, he soon veers off to some gloriously obscure anecdote about Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights or the mythography of Marina Warner, and in fact he is less interested in how his body works than in the ways bodies have been viewed and imagined down the centuries. Some studies have claimed that, in western societies at least, as our understanding increases, anxieties about our health rise. By helping to put those anxieties in context, and showing us how far we've come, Anatomies puts the humane case for making peace with our bodies just the way they are. Gavin Francis - Gavin Francis From the cover, Anatomies looks as if it should be filed under "humour", with its cartoon diagrams and fig-leafed Michelangelo. - Gavin Francis.
Kirkus Review
A literary exposition of the body by an English science writer. Aldersey-Williams (Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc, 2011, etc.) traveled, did extensive research and even dissected cadavers in an anatomy class to get a feel for what humans are like, inside and out. The result is a historical telling of how bodies have been viewed by cultures old and new. At various times, the body was seen as a world to be explored, with parts named by their discoverers. With Descartes came the concept of the body as machine, with a separate soul. Occasionally, the body was viewed as an ideal, measured to fit inside a circle or square, or of such perfect design as to reflect divine creation. Not until Shakespeare's time, following Vesalius' anatomy treatise in 1543, did "anatomizing" take off in earnest, helped by laws dictating that after hanging, criminals' bodies were to be dissected. Such a law enabled Rembrandt to paint The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which actually shows a dissected right forearm on the left arm of the cadaver. There weren't enough bodies, however, hence the advent of grave robbers. Female bodies were also in short supply, and murders of pregnant women may have figured in the production of the first atlas of fetal development. In format, Aldersey-Williams moves from the lore of the body, skin and bones as a whole, to major areas like the stomach, brain, blood, head, face and sense organs, providing a rich repertoire of folklore, humor, literary and art references for each. He ends with speculations on "extending the territory" with prostheses, hybrid creatures, robots, an increase in life span, and so on. You'll still need an anatomy textbook to grasp all the body's parts, but this book is a lovely, lively complement.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This engaging cultural history will appeal to readers who appreciate multidisciplinary perspectives on the subject of anatomy. British science writer Aldersey-Williams (Periodic Tales) draws upon his extensive knowledge of art and history, as well as science, to provide here an elegant cultural history of human anatomy. His clever titles for the parts of the book feature, e.g., a prolog entitled "The Anatomy Lesson," offering Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp as an entry point to the intellectual inquiry. In Part One, "The Whole," he introduces the body as an entity composed of two fundamental components, flesh and bones. Then he "dissects" the body in Part Two, "Carving Up the Territory." Pertinent chapters include the "The Head," "The Face," "The Brain," "The Heart," "Blood," etc. Throughout, the author interweaves allusions to art, poetry, history, and science, demonstrating ways in which each discipline relates to, and illuminates, the others. VERDICT This provocative book will appeal to a broad group of readers who enjoy histories that cross disciplines. Gross anatomy this isn't!-Lynne Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. ix |
| Acknowledgements | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. xv |
| Prologue: The Anatomy Lesson | p. 1 |
| Part 1 The Whole | |
| Mapping the Territory | p. 19 |
| Flesh | p. 38 |
| Bones | p. 49 |
| Part 2 The Parts | |
| Carving Up the Territory | p. 65 |
| The Head | p. 83 |
| The Face | p. 96 |
| The Brain | p. 112 |
| The Heart | p. 127 |
| Blood | p. 141 |
| The Ear | p. 153 |
| The Eye | p. 165 |
| The Stomach | p. 178 |
| The Hand | p. 187 |
| The Sex | p. 203 |
| The Foot | p. 215 |
| The Skin | p. 226 |
| Part 3 The Future | |
| Extending the Territory | p. 243 |
| Epilogue: Coming Home | p. 263 |
| References and Select Bibliography | p. 265 |
| Index | p. 281 |