At first I misrecognise this image as an assault. In so many Japanese films in recent years a dark haired young woman spills blood, that I see this painting by Kamata Keishu from 1851, through 21st century cinephile eyes. Then I read its caption. It's a doctor excising a cancer growth. Immediately it is something else. A benign invasion. The first such operation using general anaesthetic was carried out, I read, by Hanaoka Seishu in 1804. So the image is a celebration of the possibility of treatment. 47 years after it began, it is a snapshot of hope. It is not medically accurate—no scalpel is visible and two lines on the woman's forehead express unaccountable discomfort if a general anaesthetic was used. A moment's reflection and it's something else again—an image of false hope. All those breast cancer moon walks, and the deaths of two of my friends recently, remind me that the hope is, in part, unfulfilled. They could cut out lumps twenty decades ago, but still haven't licked the obscene disease.
This emotion passes, and then this image is a fourth thing: an exquisite pen and ink painting. Look how its circle sits beautifully within the oblong frame, and its caption is top right, balancing the visual density of bottom left. Look how her glorious face is rendered in six no-nonsense lines. Look, most of all, how the blood and hair swim together, as if in a goldfish bowl. This image comes from a time when people wanted to look at and into damaged or dead bodies. In Paris in the 19th century, a million people a year visited the Morgue, on a site behind Notre Dame which is now a memorial to those French Jews deported by Vichy and the Nazis, as a tourist attraction. Thomas Cook arranged visits there. Zola wrote about such visits in Therese Raquin. That has changed. We're more squeamish about bodies these days. What a story this picture tells.
The item in the galleries that struck me most forcefully was the display of the books of the human genome—simply the best example I've ever seen of its sheer scale. When you say that in our DNA there are 3,000,000,000 bases it really means nothing, but when you see these shelves with more than 100 packed volumes and you open them and you see the sequence of the nucleotides, it's mind-blowing and wonderful. And it gives some sense of what makes us tick, because every one of our cells has all those in them. I loved it.
Of all the art exhibits it was the anonymous obese figure, compelling both revulsion and compassion, which remains vivid in my mind. The sad mountain of flesh scarcely containable within the skin, the abstraction of the figure removing the possibility of our gaze being restricted to any specific individual. In the glass boxes below are the pills and surgical interventions of bio-medical therapeutics. The curators acknowledge our self help culture, displaying the autobiography of success, "Fat is Beautiful."
What I missed however was any epidemiological or social explanation, any reflection on the public health responses to the epidemic. Why was class so entirely absent, when it is all too obvious that in Britain it is mainly working class men, women and their children who steadily graze, seeking comfort and trapped in inertia. In the not so distant past, the body was exercised as part of everyday life and eating a social activity. What might the curators have achieved bringing in Jamie Oliver's hugely publicised attempt to rescue school meals together with the embarrassing response of government whose failure to confront the epidemic of obesity shows their failure to understand health and their preoccupation with the national sickness service.
I've long had a fascination with anatomical drawings and the history of the struggle to map the human body—a struggle not just to develop new techniques but also to overcome political, social and religious taboos.
The Tabulae Nurologicae is probably the most remarkable work of the Italian physician Antonia Scarpa, one of the great anatomical draughtsmen of the eighteenth century. It was the result of twenty years of observation during which Scarpa traced a host of new nerves and discovered the enervation of the heart. The drawings are astonishing, both in the artistry of Scarpa's draughtsmanship and in the way they reveal the delicacy of the architecture of the human body. It's worth remembering that Scarpa worked at a time in which human dissection was highly controversial.
A hundred years on, and we come to an early X-ray image of the circulatory system of a nine month old foetus. Again, it's both astonishing and shocking. I have no belief in an immaterial soul. One can't but be awestruck, though, by the inner materiality of the human body. Yet, as a culture, we remain deeply uncomfortable both with notions of death and of the materiality of the body, especially so when it is the body of a full-grown foetus. The yuk factor still saturates much of our thinking about the body.
Medicine is about a lot more than curing our ailments. It's not for nothing that medical professionals like to be referred to as doctors—literally teachers—rather than mere surgeons or bone-setters or druggists. We patients go to the clinic for epistemological reassurance as much as physical restoration. Medicine is the place where our shadowy private anxieties—is this a cancer I see before me? is this a stroke? or an intimation of insanity?—get incorporated into a field of regular public knowledge. Medical science may not help us get better, but at least it relieves us of the painful secrecy of unavowed mortal fears.
We talk to doctors as we would never talk to anyone else: they know, you know. We divulge the contents of our dreams, our bowels, and our bedrooms: take a slice of me, doctor, it's all yours, and please, please put it on public display.
The tattoo of the jolly matelot is meant to be fun, and it is. The figure depicted is not real, but a stylised one—much as one might see painted at a funfair. It as survived as a fragment of skin; we cannot know if the person carrying it had other tattoos or not. My guess is probably not. He (virtually certainly a he) may indeed have had it done at a funfair, a visible expression of a nice day out.
Tattoos—and other markings of the body, such as piercings—have served many purposes. By far the most common is as part of ceremonial. Here the tattoo has nothing to do with individual taste or self-expression; on the contrary, it marks the subservience of body and self to social ritual. The body is a marker in a collective ceremonial. Where is the nearest equivalent today? Perhaps in the painted faces of football fans, who publicly abandon their individuality in pursuit of a collective cause.
Why have tattoos and body piercing become so common again in our society? Some say the practice marks a return of the primitive—tribalism as a protest against a high-technology civilisation. Certainly, tattoos can sometimes be seen as a sign of protest, a rejection of the mainstream. But most modern tattooing isn't so, for it has become so widespread; and it isn't part of collective ceremonial either. I would describe it more as cultural fusion, a reflection of a globalised and commercialised world far more than a rejection of it. The tattoo of the matelot is not like that at all. It has a naiveté and innocence about it that it would be hard or impossible to go back to now.
One of the first things one often notices about Asian erotic art—whether coming from the Orient or the Indian sub-continent—are the facial expressions. Little smiles of other-worldly serenity or quizzical amusement are what they look like to the eyes of westerners, thoroughly antithetical to the fierce, passionate grimaces we regard as natural manifestations of lust. But then, in this particular object, and despite the male's erection (located unnaturally low on his abdomen, it seems to me), lust seems altogether absent, and even the traditional little smiles are lacking; both figures appear distracted, their minds elsewhere, with blank faces and no eye-contact between them. No genital contact either, of course; is he about to enter her, or has he just withdrawn? If the former, some bodily adjustment will be required should they hope to effect intromission.
In addition, the figures themselves are vaguely disturbing. There is something almost infantile about them. This impression may partly derive from the natural pallor of the porcelain, but it also results from the soft, doughy modeling of the bodies. Note the male's under-developed shoulders and chest, and the woman's immature (not merely small) breasts, and the fleshy, unmuscled lower halves of both figures. It is the daub of black paint on the female suggestive of pubic hair that seems anomalous.
In this genetically-obsessed age, when the double helix has become an internationally recognised logo and casual references to DNA are routinely tossed into newspaper articles and dinner table conversations, many artists have attempted to create symbolic representations of the human genome, and these are well-represented in the Wellcome Collection. But of all of them the one that speaks most powerfully to me is Andrea Duncan's tableau. Human DNA is arranged in 22 matched pairs of chromosomes plus the XX or XY sex chromosomes, each with a characteristic shape when fixed and studied under the microscope. Geneticists conventionally display the 23 pairs in an array rather as Victorian lepidopterists used to mount butterflies. Duncan has adopted the same convention, but each of her pairs of chromosomes is made from babies' socks. This startling image, at once tender and forceful, makes us confront the relationship between the minute chromosomal structures, visible and interpretable only because of the technical wizardry of science, and the fragile life of a baby. Above all it urges us to reflect on the trajectory of development through which over the nine months of pregnancy through which the fused egg and sperm utilise their chromosomes in becoming the hundred trillion cells of the new-born human.
We talk of someone having a heart of gold; but really, having a heart
of silver is a more realistic goal for most of us. This particular
sculpture can be an ethical emblem for humanity, it its way… At the
same time, its soft metallic tints and the hyperreality of detail both
draw and repel: is this what a human heart "looks" like? That we use
metals for metaphors says something about us, and this oddly real
sculpture sharpens our understanding that we see ourselves (our
innermost self, the "heart" of ourselves) strangely .
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