The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [47]
They start from the top, literally. In the push-up start position, they determine, holding the wrists stable requires four carpal extensor and flexor muscles and three spinal nerves. Maintaining slight elbow flexion relies on the triceps brachii, anterior deltoid, serratus anterior, and several thoracic muscles, plus the radial, axillary, and long thoracic nerves, as well as spinal nerves C5 through C8 and T1. Holding the neck steady and level requires another ten nerves and muscles.
At eighteen minutes and counting, the chalkboard is a madman’s cell wall.
As they focus on the next step, lowering the body toward the ground, they get stuck—really stuck—unable to agree on which back muscles are, and which are not, involved.
“Maybe I should do a push-up for you,” I volunteer.
All four look at me as if I were a cooling breeze.
Ten push-ups later, things start clicking, and not just from my shoulder joints. The lats, the traps, the pecs, both major and minor, all come into play. Click, click, click. The scapula, humerus, and glenohumeral joint join the list—
“And we can’t forget to mention gravity!” Sam interjects, more impassioned than I have ever seen him. To the scritching sound of chalk on a blackboard, the group has transformed from an anxious lot to a confident one. I have no doubt whatsoever that they will nail their presentation. And, sure enough, they do.
Though I hate to play favorites, I must concede that my favorite in-class presentation does not come until two weeks later. It is “the queen’s wave,” as analyzed by Adrienne and company. Watching these four energetic young women deconstruct this signature of royal reserve is a delight. Somehow, the white lab coats and ponytails add to the charm. I also find the movement itself fascinating; it barely squeezes into the dictionary definition of the word wave, for the fingers do not wag. Rather, the queen’s wave is an upright hand performing what looks like a slow stirring of the air.
Such subtlety does not come simply, as the team explains. In one motion, the clavicle elevates, the scapula rotates, and the shoulder abducts, all in service to the arm as it rises fluidly into the air. At the same time, the hand cups and the forearm supinates ever so slightly. The queen, remember, waves with the back of her hand rather than the palm. Of course, the greeting is impossible without a great interplay of muscles and nerves, but what really makes this movement majestic, it strikes me, occurs in the carpal region. In other words, it’s all in the wrist, which must be held perfectly still, as if it were an anatomical exemplar of monarchical stability. This is where a wave becomes a wave becoming of a queen.
JUST AS A chance encounter with Joseph Bellot “gave an éclat” to H. V. Carter’s “entrée into Paris,” as he had told Lily, a brush with royalty brought his stay to a memorable close. On Sunday, January 30, 1853, two days before Carter packed his bags for home, he joined the crowds lining the streets for the grand procession of Napoleon III and his betrothed on their way to Notre Dame to be married. The forty-four-year-old emperor, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had chosen as his bride a Spanish-born beauty named Eugénie, who was almost twenty years younger.
“Whole scene exciting. All Paris out,” Carter reports in his diary.
The festivities continued into the night. The City of Light shone as never before, with the Place de la Concorde aglow with “electric lights” and “illuminations very brilliant everywhere.” Even so, it was Carter’s glimpse of Empress Eugénie earlier in the day that still burned most brightly: “Nose aquiline, chin small, upper lip [a] little curved,” he notes, with an artist’s eye for detail. Watching her greet the throngs, Carter had not seen joy in the twenty-six-year-old’s lovely face. Instead, “expression quiet and resigned.”
Drawing upon this memory, he would create a portrait of Eugénie shortly after getting home. But first things first. As per tradition, he marked his return to London