Kate Womersley

Stiffen the sinews

This Mortal Coil explores the history of anatomy over the centuries —and finds that we still don’t really know how we work

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts.

Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in the course manual for directions about how to cut — through? around? underneath? But there was no mention of these pleasure-giving, milk-yielding, cancer-visited organs.

One justification for the vast expense of cadaveric dissection is to develop a clinical understanding of the body in its supposed entirety. Omitting the breasts reflects a way of thinking — from which medicine has not yet matured — that still sees the female form as a detour from the human standard.

In This Mortal Coil, Fay Bound Alberti argues that the study of ‘anatomy is not merely a biomedical discipline, but also a philosophical endeavour’, to which I would add that it is also crucially political. The book’s central message is that mankind’s bony scaffolding, biochemical reactivity and nervous wirings have barely changed over millennia, but appreciation of how bodies work, whose bodies matter and the interplay between physiology and feeling has changed beyond recognition. We may look similar enough to Hamlet, but we don’t experience the world like him.

Each chapter focuses on a body part — the breast, the tongue, the spine — and traces a history of attitudes and oversights through the centuries. Alberti’s analysis at times leaves the people of the past feeling ‘remote from us because we know so much more than they did’, as T.S. Eliot said about his literary predecessors. Sperm and skeletal bone were once thought to be made of the same material; skin was considered a waste product excreted by the body; eating soap was believed to dissolve body fat.

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