COMPARATIVE ANATOMY

Joanna Kalm:

Looking at the history of medicine has been one of the most paradoxical experiences for me. On the one hand, I am aware and grateful for what can be done today through biomedical approaches, on the other hand, it is challenging to comprehend how many bodies have been executed, snatched, and experimented upon – both human and animal – for us to have an eery under-the-skin view of human body. 

What is truly surprising is how normalised peering under the skin has become for us, be it using a knife or inserting a tiny camera into the vessels of the heart. It is impossible now to imagine the body as closed, as a land of unknown. Body as a landscape has been colonised by extraordinary scientific thirst and gaze. The latter is clearly sensible in a letter written by Andreas Vesalius's, a 16th-century anatomist, describing the process of cadaver acquisition: 

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“While out walking, looking for bones in the place where on the country highways eventually, to the great convenience of students, all those who have been executed are customarily placed, I happened upon a dried cadaver.... The bones were entirely bare, held together by the ligaments alone, and only the origin and insertion of the muscles were preserved.... With the help of Gemma, I climbed the stake and pulled off the femur from the hip bone. While tugging at the specimen, the scapulae together with the arms and hands also followed, although the fingers of one hand, both patellae and one foot were missing. After I had brought the legs and arms home in secret and successive trips (leaving the head behind with the entire trunk of the body), I allowed myself to be shut out of the city in the evening in order to obtain the thorax which was firmly held by a chain. I was burning with so great a desire ... that I was not afraid to snatch in the middle of the night what I so longed for.... The next day I transported the bones home piecemeal through another gate of the city ... and constructed that skeleton which is preserved at Louvain in the home of my very dear old friend Gisbertus Carbo.” 

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Vesalius was in essence uncovering new territories. What was striking to me was his attitude towards the body, undeniably an object-view, even though this body had been living and loving in their own time. José van Dijck analyses that the biomedical gaze is founded on two beliefs: that by seeing more and better into the body, curing will be more efficient – "seeing is curing" (2005: 6-7) –, and that looking into the body is an innocent activity, one can look without harming (Ibid). Thus, one could say that Vesalius’s acts were justified, he was, after all, acting in the name of anatomy, science and education. 

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However, Van Dijck refers to Ian Hacking who, on the contrary, posits that seeing is an act of transformation because it changes our personal and collective conceptualisation and representation of body/embodiment as well as our understanding of accepted modes of curing, i.e. ways a body can be attended to (2005: 8). It is pertinent to ask then how has Vesaluis’s representations of the body impacted how we look-act as bodies today. In Vesalius’s autopsies and drawings, fat and connective tissue were removed, and bodies were represented in a reminiscent manner of Ancient Greek sculptures. Open any anatomy book today, fat and connective tissue are largely discarded, perhaps because these are parts of the body too global, too fluid and flexible to be fixed into the object-view of body. If Vesalius’s representations were prone to ideas of an ideal body, then most anatomists have worked towards a conception of a 'standard body' or 'normal healthy body' (Dicjk 2021: 36), a sort of an 'middle-ground' of all bodies put together. A body-image often thought of as objective and neutral but at the same time prescriptive and exclusive.

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A founding motivation for "Comparative Anatomy" was to attend to the questions of the liveliness of persons and animals depicted in biomedical representations. For me, as in many aspects of my work, this boiled down to the notion of empathy. An empathy which I found lacking in the above letter written by Vesalius. How to surpass the object-view of bodies no longer living? In the case of "Comparative Anatomy", we worked with a woman named Tiiu, to be precise, we worked with her skeleton 'living’ at Tartu University veterinary complex amongst countless other animal skeletons. We attended to her life story as a way of redeeming her liveliness, and we also attended to her materiality – her bones. Are her bones just empty soulless matter… or are they 'her'? Each person will have their own answer to this question, depending on where they’re positioned on the continuum of the Cartesian divide, if at all. Some aspects, however, were certain: these bones have her DNA, they have once produced all her blood cells that would in turn transport oxygen to every cell of her body, her bones carried and supported her every step, and her life story is imprinted into their form.

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It was beautiful to be with her and to be with all the animals in the room. For me they were present, if not completely, then a very integral part of their liveliness was still held (captive) in that room, in their form. 

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José van Dijck. 2021. "Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection" in Anatomy Live. Cambridge University Press.

José van Dijck. 2005. "The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging". University of Washington Press. 

J. B. deC. M. Saunders & Charles D. O’Malley. 1950. “Andreas Vesalius”. “The World Publishing Company. 

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Photograph: Kristina Norman