The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (18 page)

Possibly the best chance the book had of seeing the light of day came in the year 1510, when Leonardo met a potential collaborator, a highly accomplished young anatomy professor named Marcantonio della Torre. According to a sixteenth-century source who’d heard the details secondhand, the two men agreed to join forces and had divvied up the responsibilities. Marcantonio would organize Leonardo’s extensive but scattered notes and write the text while Leonardo would create the illustrations. Now, whether this collaboration ever really existed remains a matter of debate among Vincian scholars. Leonardo himself never mentions it in his notebooks. Had it come to pass, however, the two might have become the Gray and Carter of the Italian High Renaissance. But Marcantonio died of the plague in 1511, and that was the end of that.

The anatomy notebooks, like the painting of the
Mona Lisa,
remained in Leonardo’s possession for the rest of his life, and few people ever got a peek at them. Following Leonardo’s death in 1519 at age sixty-seven, the collection became the property of his companion (and possible lover) of the previous dozen years, a young man of twenty-six named Francesco Melzi. Francesco stored the trove at his family’s villa near Milan, where it went virtually untouched for fifty years.

Enter the bad heir.

Upon Francesco’s death in 1570, his nephew inherited the collection and, soon after, allowed the anatomy notebooks to be broken apart and sold off. Over time, an untold number of drawings was lost, some probably destroyed for their heretical nature, but, sometime in the early seventeenth century (the date is undocumented), some somehow became the property of the Royal Library at Windsor, England. Access, however, was limited, if not impossible. It is believed that Charles I himself locked the Leonardo papers in a large chest within the library, where they remained, like objects in a forgotten time capsule, for well over a hundred years.

Then came the hero of this story, Robert Dalton, and what must have been the most extraordinary day of his career as royal librarian.

The exact date is not known, only the year, 1760; George III had just taken the throne. The key to the chest had long been lost by this point, but that did not stop Mr. Dalton from finding some way to pry it open. Perhaps curiosity had simply gotten the best of him, or more likely, he had been roused by the mention of Leonardo’s name in an old library inventory list. Either way, could Mr. Dalton ever have been prepared for what he discovered? At the bottom of the chest was a stack of miracles on paper, 779 drawings in all.

Alerting the king to this great find was
not,
my gut tells me, Mr. Dalton’s very next move. He surely allowed himself the indulgence of examining each and every drawing. Who could resist? Plus, wouldn’t a careful study fall under his purview as royal librarian? His Majesty would expect nothing less than a full accounting of the collection.

Once informed, George III invited Britain’s leading anatomist, William Hunter, to inspect the drawings. Dr. Hunter, who, along with his brother John, operated an anatomy school right next door to St. George’s Hospital, reportedly told his students that Leonardo’s work was three hundred years ahead of its time. “I expected to see little more than such designs in Anatomy as might be useful to a painter in his own profession,” Dr. Hunter admitted. But he instead saw the disciplined work of a “deep student,” adding, “When I consider what pains he has taken upon every part of the body, [and] the superiority of his universal genius,…I am fully persuaded that Leonardo was the best Anatomist, at his time, in the world.”

Even so, his work was essentially kept a well-guarded secret for another hundred years; Gray and Carter, for instance, certainly never saw and perhaps never even heard about the notebook pages. Finally, in the late nineteenth century, some of Leonardo’s drawings were exhibited in public and published in book form to great acclaim. As for Leonardo’s
Treatise on Anatomy,
however, it remained untouched, unread, unseen, a glorious volume on an imaginary bookshelf of what might have been.

MS. WHEAT SLIPS
back into the room bearing what looks like an oversized shirt box but of expensive design. She sets it down with a gentle thump and says with a sly smile, “You’ll need to wear gloves for this.” She pats the box with both hands.

“Could you clear some space?” she asks as she moves to the desk drawer where she keeps the hand wear. One of Ms. Wheat’s least glamorous job responsibilities, it turns out, is to take home the used pairs of reader’s gloves and wash them with her own fine washables. “Oh, you get a fresh pair!” she notes, not the “underwear gloves,” as she calls the others. Indeed, this pair is ultrabright and new. I pull them on and carefully unwind the string that secures the top flap of the box. By this point, I have read the label on the side of the container, but I am still amazed by what I find inside: an original copy of the greatest anatomy book of all time, Andreas Vesalius’s Renaissance-era masterwork,
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
(On the Structure of the Body).

“I thought you might want to see this,” says Ms. Wheat, barely concealing her own delight as she leans over my shoulder. What lies before us is the second edition of Vesalius’s book, dated 1555, produced a dozen years after the first and considered the definitive edition.

Though I have never seen a copy, much less touched one, I feel as though I know this book cover to cover, so pivotal is its role in the history of anatomy and also, it is no exaggeration to say, in the history of Western civilization and culture. The
Fabrica
is an atlas of the human body based on actual dissection of the human body, a practice rarely performed and widely reviled at the time it was written. This alone would have made the book significant. But, as Vesalius made clear, the book also came with a radical agenda: to dismantle the mighty doctrine of Galenism, a vast body of knowledge based on the writings of the second-century Greek physician Galen. Though riddled with errors and anachronisms, Galen’s work was still considered sacrosanct and Galen himself a revered figure. The man was to medicine what Jesus Christ was to Christianity; to challenge Galen’s word was nothing short of heresy. Vesalius knew he would be stepping onto a minefield in publishing his book, yet his ambition was matched by his fearlessness, which was equal to his canniness. He was not going to change fourteen hundred years of entrenched thinking with a slapped-together pamphlet, he realized. No, he had to create a volume that was perfect in its packaging, inside and out. Which is exactly what he did. Proof lay on the table before me.

This copy of the
Fabrica,
Ms. Wheat explains, was donated to the library by a successful anesthesiologist who dabbled in antiquarian books. He believed it had been “locked up in a monastery for four centuries,” she notes, and, by the looks of it, I would say he was right. The cover is absolutely unmarred.

“And look”—Ms. Wheat points to the edge opposite the spine—

“It still has its sheen,” I say, completing the thought. Like the gilding on an old family Bible, the edges were finished with a fine red varnish that makes the book look fittingly grand.

Ms. Wheat leaves me alone with the
Fabrica
while she attends to another patron. I carefully turn the cover and page to what serves as the sixteenth-century equivalent of an author photo, an engraving of Andreas Vesalius at work in his laboratory. The woodcut shows a swarthy, bearded man with an uncompromising gaze. To his left is a partially dissected cadaver, suspended upright, which he is using to demonstrate the long tendons of the hand. Rather than wearing a dissector’s smock, Vesalius is dressed like a prince in an ornate tunic, as if symbolically distancing himself from anatomy’s unseemly reputation. The man is immediately fascinating.

Andreas Vesalius, born in Belgium in 1514, entered medical school at age nineteen. Fortuitously, this was right at the time when Galen’s entire oeuvre was being printed in its original Greek for the first time. Up until this point, students had been studying Galenism through translations of translations. Now it was as though a long-neglected masterpiece were restored to its original brilliance—at least, that’s how most scholars viewed the new Galen. But not Vesalius. Fluent in classical Greek and able to read Galen’s actual words, Vesalius saw the cracks and began making notes. The first threads of the
Fabrica
took form.

Andreas Vesalius

In the years following medical school, Vesalius gradually gained experience in dissecting corpses, something Galen had never been able to do, as dissection was forbidden in ancient Greek society. Vesalius attended autopsies and also managed to obtain bodies of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses for his own private study. In this respect, he was very much like Leonardo, though the world would not have to wait long to learn his thoughts.

Like Henry Gray, Vesalius became a professor of surgery and anatomy (at the University of Padua, Italy) and, in his every spare moment, devoted himself to writing. He spent two years on the first edition of the
Fabrica,
which he completed in 1542. Deliberately aiming for a lofty tone befitting a scholarly work, he wrote in a highly refined form of Latin. While I unfortunately would not know high Latin from low, I find myself enjoying the text for its visual aesthetics alone. Each page is exquisitely designed and composed. And the woodcut illustrations, still celebrated for their fidelity to human anatomy, are extraordinary. Well over four hundred fill the book. Some are as small as thumbnails (including one of a thumbnail); others are elaborate two-page foldouts with detailed keys.

As with Gray, it is often assumed that Vesalius was his own artist when in fact he worked closely with an illustrator (uncredited, though most likely it was the Flemish artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar) and served as art director, to use a modern term. Nowhere is Vesalius’s hand more evident than in the many drawings of full-length figures. In spite of how extensive each dissection may be, each figure is depicted in an active, lifelike pose. One skeleton looks like a musician playing an invisible saxophone; another, as if he’s taken a break from orating to show off his abdominal viscera. With these startling images, Vesalius was attempting to humanize what many considered an inhuman practice, to show that anatomy is a science of the living body. As distinctive as the poses are the settings. The figures are often standing atop a mountain plateau, a kind of Vesalian Valhalla, in my view. Here again, Vesalius was making a powerful point visually—literally elevating the cadaver, the source of anatomical truth.

Illustration from the
Fabrica
by Andreas Vesalius

Deliberately mirroring the structure of Galen’s works on anatomy, Vesalius divided the
Fabrica
into seven “books,” or sections. But instead of paying homage, he systematically laid out all of Galen’s errors and corrected them one by one. No, the human liver does not have five lobes but two. (Galen had counted five in a dog and concluded people must also have that number.) No, arteries do not originate in the liver but in the heart. And no, once and for all, animal anatomy is not the same as human. Vesalius’s brazenness infuriated old-school anatomists, including teachers who had once been his mentors, but Vesalius’s work was too persuasive to be dismissed. And, in yet another canny move, he ensured that his ideas would be widely disseminated. Specifically for students, he produced a condensed and less expensive version of the
Fabrica
and also published a German version, as Germany at the time was a major publishing market. With surprising suddenness, dissection became de rigueur in medical schools, and Vesalius himself became something of a celebrity, attracting huge crowds to his lectures and dissection demonstrations. So highly esteemed was he that Emperor Charles V named Andreas Vesalius his personal physician. Today he is known by a grander title: the founder of the modern science of anatomy.

Speaking of which: I would love to spend more time with the
Fabrica,
but I have an anatomy class to attend. Pulling off my gloves, I am first puzzled, then slightly horrified to find that the fabric at the fingertips is dirty. Careful as I was, traces of the five hundred-year-old ink rubbed off. Or, to put it another way, traces of
Vesalius
rubbed off. Which almost makes me wish I had saved them. By the time this thought hits, though, it is too late. The cotton gloves are bound for Ms. Wheat’s laundry basket, and I am up in the anatomy lab pulling on a pair of rubber ones.