Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson

This is a painting that shows up in my lecture slides as well, but for a very different reason. While the bodies of executed criminals were used in dissection suggests, as the authors of The Practice of Looking point out, the difference in social status between those attending the dissection lecture and the body being dissected, the painting also provides a shift in how medicine was viewed. That a body was being dissected at all suggests a difference in thought with regards to dissection--good luck getting a corpse to dissect if you were a da Vinci or Michelangelo. They dissected corpses, but they had to get them on the sly--dissection was forbidden by the Catholic church. Rembrandt's Holland was split between Catholics and Protestants. That Rembrandt is showing a public dissection attended by prominant burghers without fear of the authorities (even if the painting is a composite)rather than a furtive midnight dig and an Igor-like assistant hauling a mysterious bag into the laboratory also signals a change in how the human body is viewed.

The book briefly mentions the ethics of displaying bodies, such as the 19th Century Paris morgues, the Visible Human Project and Body Worlds, but doesn't go into much depth. I know there is a big concern with that here--the bodies at Dixon Mounds had been on public display until fairly recently (not any more) and legislation has been passed regarding the display of human remains. I ended up my Survey of British Lit class with Seamus Heaney's "Gauballe Man" and "Punishment" and I debated showing them photographs of these people. I'm not bothered by them, but then if the CSI series did an archeological version, I'b probalby do something about my television (like get a new one). Meanwhile I've made due with PBS's Secrets of the Dead--the episode of ergotine being the likely suspect in teh Salem With Trials also looked at some of the European bog people. But I digress. Finally, I decided to use a photo of Tollund man (he looks like he's sleepingso the student's shouldn't be too grossed out--Heaney wrote a poem on him too, but it wasn't in our anthology). There's the hint of Danish blood in my family tree, so Tollund man could be a relative, albeit a distant one, so I'm not appropriating someone from outside my "group". When I've gone hiking in bogs, I've joked with my hiking partners that someone centuries from now will find out blackened bodies and surmise we were part of some ancient ritual that involved the goddess Canon Eos judging by the necklaces around out necks and strange three-pronged pyramids. Plus, I think these bodies found in European bogs are fascinating and if I weren't so horrible at chemistry, forensic anthropolgy definitely has its attractions.

This reminds me of a story from a few years ago. My niece was in junior high, and she was very upset at her social studies teacher for focusing on Otzi the Iceman (the 9,000 body found by hikers in the Italian alps in 1991). In talking with her, I discovered the real reason she was upset was because Otzi was a boy mummy and she wanted to know where the girls mummies were. So, I went on-line and found articles on the Incan Ice Maiden found in Peru and the Pazyryk Ice Maiden found near Mongolia/Siberia. Despite the gruesome nature of this research, my niece went to bed happy because now she had seen the girl mummies.