One of my strongest visual and olfactory memories of my graduate studies in dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the afternoon that my “anatomy & physiology of dance” class visited the UIUC College of Medicine’s cadaver lab.
Up until that day, we’d been studying anatomy in books and putting to test that book-knowledge in the dance studio. Probably more than many med students, we dancers were eager to palpate the origins and insertions of as many muscles as we could, on our own bodies as well as our classmates. (Truly understanding the muscles of the pelvis, we thought, might make us better jumpers or improve our turnout!)
We got especially excited when practicing movements or exercises that would allow us to more deeply feel those connections in muscle groups that were under too many other layers of muscle to feel with our fingers. Encountering muscles and bony processes through touch and somatic experience made sense to us in the studio. We imagined what these bits looked like based on the drawings in our kinesiology and anatomy books. But to encounter them on the cadavers—laying on long metal tables with their leathery, waxy skin and the overwhelming odor of formaldehyde everywhere—was something else altogether.
Those memories came flooding back as I read Bill Hayes’s book The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy this spring. Hayes recounts the many hours he spent in the anatomy labs at the University of California - San Francisco while doing research for the book. He’d set out to write a history of the creation of that classic medical text and realized that in order to really understand the drawings and the nature of what it meant to be an anatomist then (and today), he needed to learn “the art of dissection.” Understanding the drawings—and the intense curiosity in and familiarity with the body that was required to make them—became even more important as Hayes discovered that there was little in the historical record about Henry Gray. Gray was the author of Gray’s Anatomy, and most of his papers were lost at the time of his death. But there was an abundance of information on Henry Vandyke Carter, a physician, anatomist and artist who was the illustrator of the tome. (Ironically, while Gray gets top billing, most of us casual page-flippers are much more familiar with Carter’s work than with Gray’s.)
Hayes’s narrative unfolds in two centuries and on three planes, as he interweaves his experiences in the lab in San Francisco, his detective work combing through London’s obscure medical libraries, and his fascinating re-construction of Carter’s life as a young doctor trying to find his way under the tutelage of the older and more accomplished Gray. It’s a remarkable book and I’m looking forward to hearing Hayes discuss it—and his approach to putting historical research in the context of current science—in two separate Festival events.
Lecture
#406: Sun, Nov. 7 1:30 - 2:30 PM
Tags: anatomy, dance, history, illustrator
