The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [0]
Title Page
Dedication
prologue
PART ONE THE STUDENT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO THE ARTIST
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART THREE THE ANATOMIST
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
epilogue
appendix
acknowledgments
bibliography
About the Author
Also by Bill Hayes
Copyright
For Steve Byrne
Prologue
LOOKING BACK, I CAN SEE HOW MY WHOLE LIFE HAS LED TO THIS: a book about a book about anatomy and about the education of an anatomist, albeit an amateur one. Sigmund Freud was right, it turns out: Anatomy is destiny—or mine, at least.
A bloom in a boulder crack, my fascination with human anatomy took root in the less-than-accommodating conditions of a strict Irish Catholic upbringing in the 1960s. You are made in God’s image, I remember being told by the nuns in catechism classes, which struck me as wonderful news; to cherish your body was to cherish the Creator. At the same time, though, the story of Adam and Eve made it frighteningly clear that the body is a shameful vessel for sin. Even today, while I no longer consider myself Catholic or even religious, the tale of their fall from innocence haunts me: God warning Adam, you shall die if you eat of the tree of knowledge, and then Eve—poor, gullible Eve—sweet-talked by the snake, pulling an apple from the tree. I still just want to stop her—No!
“Then the eyes of both were opened; and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together.” Banishment from the garden was but one part of their sentence. “You are dust,” God tells them, “and to dust you shall return.”
The moral, simple enough for a child to grasp, is that when God says no, he really means no. But the story also conveys a more insidious notion: awareness of the body may lead to spiritual death.
To the eight-year-old me, fresh from making my first confession, Adam and Eve were especially effective in promoting the idea that nakedness went hand in hand with sin. And yet, making matters morally confusing, there were some naked people it was okay to look at, whose nakedness you were meant to take notice of, beginning, ironically enough, with Adam and Eve. Even in my children’s Bible, those two appeared as delectable as a couple of ripe Red Delicious apples. The most frequent naked body I saw while growing up, though, belonged to Jesus. In our house, crucifixes were as common as light fixtures. A small bronze one hung above my bed, and I prayed to it every night. But, in a curious design choice, as I think of it now, the largest crucifix was posted right outside the bathroom my five sisters and I shared. Jesus, as if clad in a towel rather than a loincloth, appeared to be waiting his turn for the shower. I can still recall every detail of that crucifix, a wooden one my dad had bought in Mexico. The body was carved with such care, so that legs and arms were finely muscled and veined and the torso made long and sinuous. His nakedness exposed every crucifixion wound and was crucial to reinforcing a central tenet of the church: The gash along his ribs was due to our sin. The trickle of blood down his forehead was our fault. Christ’s pain was meant to cause you the same. His death, we were never to forget, was for us.
Providing a ballast to the Irish Catholicism of my father was my mother. Mom had once been an aspiring painter in New York City before meeting Dad, and she was not Catholic. Only on the rarest occasions did Mom join us at church. I remember how, every year on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, when a thumb-press of ash was placed on your forehead as a reminder of your mortality, Mom’s unsmudged brow marked her as unlike my father and sisters and me. Dad would jokingly call her “a heathen” but, almost in the same breath, say earnestly to his six children, “Mom’s a saint—that’s why she doesn’t need to go to Mass.”
To me, Mom represented the everyday, but also another, higher