The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [1]
Lining the shelf on the opposite wall was our 1965 World Book encyclopedia, twenty-two volumes, straight-spined and orderly, like the cadets in a photo nearby: the 1949 graduating class of West Point, with Dad standing third from the left, front row. It was in World Book volume H that I got my first peek inside the human body. Between entries on hairstyling and hysterectomy, there was a spectacular anatomical illustration composed of ten bright transparent overlays. The body illustrated was male, although, in a nod to modesty, no genitalia were shown. To this day, I still recall the smell of the plastic sheets and the sticky sound they made when you turned each overlay. Sometimes I would run up to one of my sisters and flash Encyclopedia Man in her face, eliciting a guaranteed ick!!—this form of teasing worked especially well on Julia, three years younger than me, and Shannon, two years older—but we would then often sit down and look at the illustrations together, drawn into the illusion of a deep body adventure, as though we wore X-Ray Specs that actually worked. Paging from left to right performed a crude dissection, salmon-colored muscle giving way to the wet worms of viscera giving way to less and less until, finally, on the last transparency, only the unadorned skeleton remained.
My two best friends’ dads were both doctors, one a G.P., one a dermatologist. Their family bookshelves held volumes that I would never be able to find even at the Spokane Public Library: old medical textbooks. Kept on topmost shelves, they were meant to be out of reach, out of sight, which is of course exactly why I would urge Chris or Andy to fetch them. What I will never forget is the deformities and disfigurements pictured: photos, as artless as mug shots, of elephantiasis, leprosy, gargantuan tumors, and other conditions that made the body seductively grotesque.
Though I confided this to neither Chris nor Andy nor any of my sisters, I dreamed of becoming a doctor one day. But whether because I did so poorly in high school biology and chemistry or because I did so well in English and writing classes, I eventually shelved the idea of a medical career. Still, my interest in the workings of the body remained; indeed, I think it intensified in direct proportion to my burgeoning interest in sex. But by the time I was actually having sex, after moving to San Francisco in the early 1980s, the body had turned virtually overnight into something to fear, a vessel not for mortal sin but for a deadly virus. That was when I bought my first copy of Gray’s Anatomy.
I got it for the pictures: hundreds of drawings of lean muscle, bones, and organs, each meticulously rendered and labeled as if it were a rare entomology specimen. Lying on a bookstore table, the thick volume’s cover image had first drawn me in: a profile of a man whose face is intact but whose neck is not, to put it mildly. The skin from the chin to the collarbone is missing, revealing strips of muscle and a tangle of blood vessels. As gruesome as it was, I found the image incongruously beautiful. The young man wore such a serene expression, and there was something so intimate in his pose—the way his head was gently turned to expose every detail, as if in invitation: Here, come closer, take a look.
Marked down to $9.95, the book was also a deal I could not pass up. Gray’s Anatomy, like Bulfinch’s Mythology or Plato’s Republic, seemed a classic every person should have—if only just to have—so I bought a copy.