Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [17]
Disease was a result of a person’s “humors” getting out of balance for some reason. Diagnosis was a matter of doctors looking at the patient’s urine and deciding which humor was out of balance, with bloodletting and vomiting as the usual recommended remedies. The heavens affected the humors, so astrology played a vital part in diagnosis. Almost any symptom—and cure—could be connected to the alignment of the planets on that particular day. There was no need to know the actual structure of an organ or how it functioned.
Leonardo, inspired by painting people from the outside, was determined to understand exactly what went on inside. There are plans in his notebooks for a whole book based on his drawings, to be called On the Human Body. Incredibly ambitious, it was to deal with how the body worked from the time it was a fetus right up until the moment of death. He wanted to explain the nervous system, the muscles and veins and capillaries, how the five senses worked, the flow of blood, each bone of the skeleton, every organ . . . everything. He wanted to see, in detail, how it all worked so he could understand how it all worked.
He had been able to dissect some animals, but he was itching to do the real thing—human dissections. In anatomy classes at medical schools, cutting into a human body—even a dead one—was considered repugnant. Human dissections were rare and generally done on the bodies of recently executed criminals. It was more important to read Hippocrates (the “father of medicine,” born around 460 B.C.) and Galen (born in A.D. 129). Galen had dissected only dogs, pigs, and monkeys, yet his findings were applied to humans.
Historians disagree about exactly when Leonardo began dissecting human corpses. It’s possible he may have started in the 1460s while still at Verrocchio’s workshop, to satisfy the master’s demand for accuracy in painting. A famous professor of medicine, Marcantonio della Torre, may have smuggled Leonardo into a hospital in Florence and gotten him going on cadavers. (Some historians think Leonardo actually lived at the hospital for a time.)
After 1487, however, he became much more systematic and skilled in his study of human anatomy. He worked alone, by candlelight and only at night, to avoid prying eyes. In total, he dissected some thirty dead bodies, most of recently executed criminals or homeless beggars.
The more he learned, the more amazed he was at the intricacies of the human body: “I do not think that rough men, of bad habits and little intelligence, deserve such a fine instrument.”
It is hard to exaggerate the creepiness of Leonardo’s anatomy studies. There was no refrigeration or formaldehyde, so a corpse would have started to decay immediately. For his own sanity, Leonardo had to work as quickly as possible. But to get the information for his notebooks—the structure of the heart, for example, drawn from several different angles, and with the layers peeled back like the skin of an onion—he had to be on intimate terms with a corpse for as long as a week. Presumably he tried to schedule dissections for the colder winter months.
Here was an artist who didn’t like getting paint under his fingernails; how did he deal with being up to his elbows in guts and gore? He described it in his notebooks as disturbing, “living through the night hours in the company of quartered”—cut into pieces—“and flayed corpses fearful to behold.”
A serene person in general, Leonardo was cool, calm, and collected about witnessing what most people today could not bear to watch. Besides dissecting, he observed prisoners being tortured (he sketched their facial expressions) and executed. He did a quick but extremely realistic drawing of a nobleman’s corpse dangling from a noose. People with amputated or deformed limbs—anyone who “broke the rules” of proportion—fascinated him.
Saws and scalpels were his tools, some of them his own inventions. After separating the organs, he washed them thoroughly in water