Descartes' Bones Read Online Free Page B

medical men ridiculed the idea of grounding scientific work on observation, which, given that the real world was rife with errors and exceptions, seemed patently foolish. Others stayed committed to the notion of two types of blood and thus of the value of bleeding a patient. Phlebotomy (bloodletting) was one of the roots of Galenist healing, and doctors and patients alike clung to it. It was tied both to the theory of humors and to the belief that purging the system was a key to healing, whether it was of the contents of the stomach, the bowels, or a portion of “impure” blood. Observation, however, showed that rather than restoring health, bleeding weakened a patient. To advocates of the new medical philosophy, bloodletting was symbolic of all that was wrong with the old ways—thus the reaction of Descartes, on his deathbed, to the suggestion of it.
    Steadily, Harvey’s system gained ground in the 1630s; people began to see it as the basis for a whole new approach to medicine, and exploring the recesses of the human body became a fad and an industry and a fascination matching the exploration of the heavens. In Holland, Reinier de Graaf delved into the mystery of birth: he applied his dissecting blade to pregnant rabbits and charted the route the fertilized ovum followed to the uterus. The Dane Nicolaus Steno, working in the hospital of the grand duke of Tuscany, took a step toward demystifying human emotion by laying bare the tear ducts and examining how they functioned. Medical professors created “domestic amphitheaters” in their homes to accommodate the rush of students signing up to observe dissections of human cadavers and vivisections of animals.
    In Amsterdam, the physician Nicolaes Tulp gave public anatomy demonstrations, using the corpses of executed criminals. Far from being branded as an atheist, he was immortalized in a painting by Rembrandt in which, using forceps, he pulls aloft a muscle of the left arm of a cadaver. What’s more, according to A. C. Masquelet, an orthopedic surgeon who has made a study of the painting, Tulp is holding his own left hand in such a way as to indicate how this particular arm muscle—the flexor digitorum superficialis—controls movement of the hand: the lesson isn’t just on the fact of muscles but on the cause-and-effect relationships between parts of the body. The observers in the painting—neatly bearded men with white lace collars—lean in to watch, fascinated by the demonstration.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
signals one of those telltale shifts in what is deemed socially acceptable—like women wearing pants or the end of segregation in the American South—which to some spell the downfall of civilization while others view the change as an expression of a new era with a new idea of progress. The recesses of the human body, long kept determinedly shrouded in respectful mystery, had become spectacle.

    B UT FOR ALL THE interest generated by the great scientific explorers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Brahe, and others—their work was fragmented, so that the immediate effect of the endless experimenting, dissecting, peering, and analyzing was more confusion than clarity. Their results didn’t fit within the framework of knowledge that had existed for four hundred years. It wasn’t possible to use the ancient writers to explain them, and in fact the results threatened to undermine the pillars that had held up the edifice of meaning. It’s difficult for us to appreciate what this meant at the time, largely because, as a direct consequence of these men’s work, we live in a world with more than one meaning system. Of course, there are fundamentalisms now, too, but even fundamentalists today live with an awareness of relativism. They know there are other systems of belief, even if they are sure those are wrong. In the seventeenth century