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The Great Dead Body Teachers
Jackie Dent
Ultimo, $36.99
Anatomy. The biological infrastructure that allows us to breathe, dream, fall in love, build, demolish, dance and, inevitably, die. Anatomy, on the face of it, is the rather straightforward study of how our body parts are organised. Gray’s Anatomy, for 175 years the luridly illustrated bible of the calling, can at once appear grotesque, yet as intriguing as John Bradfield’s designs for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The parts all fit together, and the result is clearly fit for purpose. But for centuries there had been a less mechanistic cognisance, an awe-struck, uncomprehending appreciation of how, miraculously, these components interact, and how they came to be so beautifully adapted to their functions.
An image from the “Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy” exhibition.Credit:The J. Paul Getty Trust
The mind-boggling intricacy of this tangle of bio-engineering has fascinated philosophers, religious zealots, evolutionists and, of course, the local doctor, since the first broken arms and outbreaks of cholera eons ago. Jackie Dent’s captivating, deeply personal yet refreshingly light-handed exploration of the human body, dead or alive, leaves the reader expecting a resolution of some sort, a conclusion drawn from research and personal experience.
But it isn’t there. And this, I think, is her point, and why the book works.
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Her entrée into the world of human dissection (for without dissection, preservation and classification there can be no comprehension of anatomy), comes through her discovery, while browsing through family diaries and chatting to surviving relatives, that both of her grandparents had donated their bodies to science in 1950s Queensland. In other words, they were happy for their bodies to be cut to bits and studied by medical students.
Dent’s explorations waver in purpose that, given the subject and her initial reasons for investigating it, makes sense. There is her family. There are anatomy schools. There is medical history, not much of it pretty.
We meet the men and women facing the hangman’s noose, to be told, either at sentencing or the scaffold, that their corpses would be cut asunder by the medical students waiting gleefully in the crowd. What redemption, or any path to salvation, could be expected for the souls trapped in their butchered remains? None? These were genuine terrors, endured in the cells of the condemned until very recently.