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But most prominent of all -- more central than Vesalius himself -- is a human skeleton, bearing a wooden staff, overseeing the grisly operation. Within the book, his skeletons are even more animate, situated in the landscape in poses so natural that they might be taken as members of some extreme nudist colony.

Physician's Portfolio A gallery of images. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0) The Physician's Art: Representations of Art and Medicine By Julie V. Hansen and Suzanne Porter Duke University Press Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

There's something singularly demonstrative about their gestures: Like nudists, the dead have a lesson to teach. In Vesalius, the deceased instruct the physician about life, and the lesson reaches its logical conclusion in the Latin inscription on the grave marker against which one of the more contemplative skeletons leans: "What I am now, you will soon be."

But, for the physician, even that wasn't sufficiently promising. More to the point was Juan Valverde de Amusco's "Anatome corporis humani," a book significantly smaller and, in consequence, cheaper than Vesalius' magnum opus. Less scholarly, and available in Spanish as well as Latin, Amusco's 1607 text was just the sort of Cliffs Notes to "Fabrica" eagerly sought by 17th century medical students.

While many of Amusco's images are copied from Vesalius' book -- the "illustrations are so well done it would look like envy or malignity not to take advantage of them," he confessed in his preface -- those that are his own carry his most powerful message. A flayed muscle-man holds in one hand his skin and in the other a scalpel. A physician dissects a cadaver to show the position of the heart, a secondary view provided by his own chest cavity, rent open to show two healthy lungs behind a butterflied ribcage. He's not of the dead. (Unlike the blind eyes of the cadaver he's dissecting, his have pupils.) But neither is he quite of the living. (His pupils focus not on the cadaver or even his own impossibly open chest, but rather gaze heavenward.)

The obvious reference is to the popular moral "Know thyself," but in Amusco's image we see that the self in question, the physician, knows what he does by wavering between living and dead -- by becoming a creature able to pass in both worlds, without belonging clearly to either.

It's a hard lot, being a physician, and all the more difficult given that the patient's well-being depends on not knowing the full extent of the diplomatic crosscurrents between here and the hereafter. Better to discuss ailments over carved-ivory anatomical mannequins such as were common in the 17th century. As finely wrought as religious art of the era, these miniatures of the human body, popularly used by doctors to discuss ailments with their patients, lay on wooden beds, heads at rest on lace-frilled pillows, eyes shut as in sleep. Some had pullover ball gowns, and all were given removable chest plates, beneath which were revealed vital organs of carved ivory.

Women were carved complete with fetus. (The umbilical cord was fashioned from red string.) While they share anatomical properties, these trinkets have little else in common with Amusco's open-torsoed physician: These ivory chests come off as just another garment; dissection is like getting undressed. The resting mannequins reveal nothing to themselves, nor even -- as with Vesalius' skeletons -- to us. They sleep calmly while we, the lay public, look inside them, as a deity might see inside our own living bodies. They live on, and nobody is the wiser.

Probably it's healthiest that way: We sleep like mannequins while, on our behalf, the physician negotiates with life and death. We sleep, somewhere between here and there, believing we'll wake up again. And sometimes we do.
salon.com | April 6, 2000

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