BOO!

Against the pop-psyche, New Age, millennial spiritualisms that occupy the front tables and the self-help shelves of our mega-stores, here are half a dozen titles from the darker and scholarly precincts of medical history, sociology, arts and the arcane to remind us that we are bodies in motion and at rest. We are flesh and blood and bone, beings corruptible and incorruptible. And though we may roll our own emotional and spiritual and intellectual metaphors--behaving and misbehaving, believing and disbelieving as Methodists or Buddhists or Jungians or Behaviorists or Postmodern Vegetarian Minimalists--we are bound to these bodies one and all.

None of these books will be made into a movie, nor any of their authors turn up on Oprah; still, each is an essential text, the work of uniquely curious scholarship that seeks to know the rules by investigating the exceptions or seeks to establish norms by a catalog of anomalies.

My father had a “Bell’s Pathology”; he studied it in mortuary school. And I remember, as a boy, huddling over this thick tome to study photographs of dwarfs and giants, conjoined twins, victims of massive goiters, tumors, unpronounceable maladies that made them different and singular. “Gray’s Anatomy” was another: diagrams of the nerves and circulatory systems, origin and insertion points of muscles, ball and socket joints. There is about such images a sense of secret knowledge, much like the illusion of pornography--that the body as object is somehow remarkable, singular and strange.

Just such a sense informs Jan Bondeson’s “A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities.” A hundred years after Gould & Pyle’s 968-page “Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine” “discussed strange diseases, remarkable malformations, uncommon and gruesome ways of death, and unlikely feats of fasting or gluttony,” the young doctor revisits this territory for us. Ten essays consider such wonders as spontaneous human combustion, a two-headed boy, folks infected with serpents and frogs, people with tails and the strange case of Mary Toft, an early 18th century Englishwoman whose hunger for a meal of rabbit was said to have changed her organs of reproduction in a way that made her give birth to bunnies. Examined by the anatomist of King George I, she was declared an example of “maternal impression.”

There is also an instructive chapter on the difficulties of “Apparent Death and Premature Burial”--themes that informed horrible stories down the centuries. As Bondeson writes: “The concept of death as a process is in fact correct, for unless death is very sudden--due, say, to decapitation, a bursting aneurysm, or a massive coronary embolism--the transition is gradual. In an aged individual dying from cancer, death creeps through the tissues, taking over one organ after another.” Bondeson is scrupulous about separating fact from fiction: “In several nineteenth century reports, the prematurely dead individuals are said to have eaten their own fingers or even their entire arms; modern textbooks in forensic medicine have demonstrated that such bodies were probably attacked by rodents.” That he is able to disabuse us of fantasy while leaving our fears tingling and intact is a credit to the good doctor’s surgical prose.

There are no surgeons or medicos among the contributors (organ donors, they are rightly called) to the wonderfully holistic “The Body in Parts,” an anthology edited by two Harvard English department teaching fellows, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. These are wordsmiths and notion-mongers, each of whom has taken a part--the belly, the brain, clitoris and tongue, rectum, breast, viscera and more--and allowed their considerable scholarship to roam in all directions. History and literature and medicine and art and gender politics and cultural studies and the hard sciences--the range is dizzying, a true anthology. Left alone, we’d expect these authors to produce titles fit only for those summer symposia where very brainy people without good hobbies might be found: “Image and Portent in Early Modern Deconstruction.” But Mazzio and Hillman have, by their formal conceit, left these eager minds to range freely.

From Nancy Vickers’ “Members Only,” which introduces the history of the anatomical blazon--poems in praise of the parts of the female body; to Mazzio’s “Sins of the Tongue,” which catalogs that organ’s ability to pleasure and pain, soothe and savage, tell the truth and tell the lie at once; to Peter Stallybrass’ ending essay, “Footnotes,” which details the art of the shoemaker and how they “cobbled together new visions of the body politic,” the reader is treated to real minds at play. Scott Manning Stevens’ “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain” investigates the long-standing debates between “conscience and consciousness,” between intellect and intuition, between the meaning of things and their performance. “The Body in Parts” is an abundant and instructive collection--well-illustrated, finely made, bargain-priced.

“The Sacred Remains” traces American attitudes toward the dead from the death of George Washington in 1799 and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to the emergence of organized mortuary enterprises at the close of the 19th century. The author, Gary Laderman, teaches in the religion department at Emory University and focuses on the place and treatment of the dead human body and the customs and rituals of funerals as guides to the cultural, spiritual and religious landscape. He opens his study with three sobering rhetoricals. “What should be done with the dead body? Who is best qualified to prepare the corpse for its final disposition? Does the decaying, disintegrating individual body have any symbolic value for the collective social body?”

Avoiding the temptation to say what should be done, Laderman records in purposeful detail what has been done and what it means about the group that did it. As in all historical and sociological studies, the questions, if properly framed, sound timeless and timely. The answers have applications in our lives and times. The dualism, so much a part of northern Protestantism, that divided our being between body and soul, along with the scientific and technological advances of the past century, have created shifts in the place of the dead in our lives. “The forces of life,” Laderman observes, “the disappearance of hell, and the successes of medicine began to transform death into something shameful and unnatural.” The dead body that “doesn’t work” loses its standing in a culture that values utility and function. It becomes “just a shell” in the conventional wisdom and the ceremonies that articulate these meanings.

Photographs of Lincoln’s funeral cortege, the dead at Gettysburg and early battlefield embalmers add to a well-reasoned and researched text to make “The Sacred Remains” an important study of grave matters, mortuary arts and the meaning of death.

Rosamond Purcell is neither academician nor doctor. She is an artist, a photographer much renowned. Her work is in the permanent collections of art museums from San Francisco to the Victoria & Albert in London. Her eye for the beauty in what is strange makes her “Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters” a welcome addition to any library. The book collects images and texts first presented by Purcell to the Getty Research Institute in an exhibition in autumn 1994. Chronicle Books has brought out a book that combines the author’s appetite for icons and artifacts of natural anomalies with her hungry eye’s consideration of visual, intellectual and historic objects. And though her focus is on the odd and monstrous--the winged skulls of hydrocephalics, the baby skeletons of conjoined twins, the leathery bodies pulled from European bogs--her art aligns these “natural” anomalies with the everyday traffic of creation in which each wonder becomes a metaphor for something normal, natural, ordinary. Her images mediate between our fears and wonders in a way so engaging that “Special Cases” would not be out of place on professional shelves, personal collections or coffee tables. It amazes, inspires, informs and comforts.

In “The Body Emblazoned,” British scholar Jonathan Sawday examines the Renaissance interest in anatomical studies. Dissection in the 16th and 17th centuries became a kind of spectator sport, staged medical and morality plays produced in theaters-in-the-round where the main character was the dead human body, the traffic in which commodity was brisk, the marketeering black, the interest unappeasable. “Not only were the Physicians hoping to secure bodies. The company of Barber-Surgeons, and the two universities, were also anxious to obtain ‘material.’ Additional demand arose from the Royal Society which, under its charter of 1662, was given the right to obtain bodies for dissection.” Blood and guts, sex and violence, then as now made for good productions. The table and the blade and bucket made good props. Good theater meant knowing where to cut. The human body, with its maze of parts and existential mysteries intact, could be opened, exposed, named and sorted out for anatomist, artist, poet and passerby for an evening’s entertainment, amazement or elucidation. Sawday quotes John Donne, to wit:

To our bodies turne wee then, that so

Weake men on love reveal’d may looke;

Loves mysteries in soules do grow;

But yet the body is his booke.

For those with corporeal curiosities and no access to dead bodies and agreeable vivisectionists, “The Body Emblazoned” makes the perfect gift.

Of all these titles, Katharine Young’s is the most perplexing. “Presence in the Flesh” seeks to say something about the mind-body problem, the question about where the self resides and what that ought to mean to us. And there are paragraphs that seem so disembodied, so removed, that one wonders what it is they are trying to say. In the chapter “Gynecology,” Young writes under the heading of “Breaking the Discursive Body Out of Postmodernism,” “In gynecological examinations, the body is, as it were, lifted out onto different planes of reality, reconstituted in different universes of discourse. But these are not instances of the postmodern dematerialization of the body into its signs. . . . Dismantling the body into its discourses does not dematerialize the body but rather has its footing in embodiment.” It is hard to imagine the reader to whom such sentences will make much sense.

By comparison, a chapter called “Still Life with Corpse--Pathology” contains this transcendent beauty: “When my mother first introduced me to still lifes, I thought they were paintings of things that just happened to be still, cut flowers, bowls of fruit, objects on a table . . . lives stilled, what we have come to call small murders. Just so the corpse as with the pear, the wedge of cheese, the haunch of venison, the hung pheasant, the smoked fish: the subjects are arrested in the course of transmuting. They have not altogether lost their character as life forms but have begun nonetheless to take on the character of things, substances, material objects.” Young, who lectures in anthropology at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, is widely quoted by the authors of the other books considered here. There are flashes of great connective tissue in her prose, and she comes to a conclusion that I borrow from here: “Commonly, in medicine, as in everyday life, when we become aware of our own materiality, what we are aware of is not the body as an object but the corporeality of the self. We are precipitated into our own skins, neatly embodied, acutely present in our own flesh.”