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8 Fascinating Anatomy History Facts (PHOTOS)

We are each the owner-operator of our own human body. So it's odd we don't know more about it. I'm scientifically trained, but I knew next to nothing about it when I started to write Anatomies.
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Author, The Lonely Polygamist

Author, The Lonely Polygamist
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We are each the owner-operator of our own human body. So it's odd we don't know more about it. I'm scientifically trained, but I knew next to nothing about it when I started to write Anatomies. (A paradox of the British education system I went through was that in order to specialize in some sciences, such as chemistry, I had to give up others, in particular biology, at an early age.)

There are many reasons for our ignorance, some good, some less so: the impossibility of looking inside the normal body, the closed shop of the medical profession, prudishness, terror and disgust. Even the contemporary scientific image of the body - as DNA molecules, genetic code, and our genome - seem almost calculated to remove us from any immediate sense of ourselves.

I say "owner-operator" for good reason. We both are bodies and have bodies. This gives us a strange sense of ourselves, at once embodied and yet disembodied. We seem to be relatively at ease with our consciousness or "soul," but often regard our bodies as a bit of a nuisance.

We should try to be more at ease with it. Here, I've selected some key scenes to do with getting the measure of the human body and being able to look inside it. No scalpel needed. Enjoy.

Fascinating Anatomy History
1. Ideal Human Proportions(01 of08)
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Classical artists were greatly concerned with "ideal" human proportion, which they sought to capture in their sculpture. The Greek sculptor Polykleitos created the best and earliest known example in bronze, but now only marble Roman copies such as this one survive. It was believed that mathematical ratios governed bodily perfection, although people could never agree on the actual numbers. The most successful scheme, from which are derived some measures that we still use today, was developed by the Roman architect Vitruvius. His ideal man was four cubits or six feet tall. But Vitruvius had to choose some distinctly odd measurement points on the body in order to come up with such pleasingly simple figures.
2. Vesalius(02 of08)
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The Flemish Andreas Vesalius wrote the world’s influential anatomy textbook in 1543. It contains magnificent engravings by an artist of Titian’s studio showing the body in all stages of dissection, often in poses which lend a macabre humor to the scene. Vesalius included autobiographical anecdotes within his text describing the interior of the body. From these we know that he was driven to obtain his subjects by getting himself locked outside town after the curfew. He was then able to work undisturbed during the night taking down corpses and body parts from the gibbets along the roadside where hanged criminals were left as a warning to others.
3. Tulp(03 of08)
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Perhaps the most famous image of an anatomical demonstration is the painting known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, painted by Rembrandt in 1632. It was the artist’s breakthrough painting, a daring reinvention of the group portrait, in which the subjects are all given attitudes and expressions that tell us about the importance of what is going on. But Rembrandt cannot have painted the scene true to life. An ‘anatomy’ proceeds with an examination of the abdomen first, so the smelliest parts can be swiftly removed from the theatre. The focus here on the hand is artificial, showing how the human body at this time was beginning to be regarded as a kind of mechanism understandable to science.
4. John Hunter(04 of08)
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Later anatomists were sometimes no less gruesome in their methods than Vesalius. The eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon John Hunter made pioneering advances, and may have been the first to use the word ‘transplant’ in a medical context, in his Natural History of the Human Teeth of 1778. Some of his most successful experiments involved the live transplant of teeth in adult patients. The teeth in question were extracted from doubtless less than willing children because their slightly smaller size would help to ensure a good fit. Hunter recommended having several children waiting so that if one tooth didn’t fit another could be tried. He is regarded as one of the greatest pioneers of modern medicine.
5. Guillotined Head(05 of08)
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The brain was sometimes thought to contain the soul even after death. This idea received an unlikely test when a condemned criminal was guillotined in Orléans, France, in 1905. A curious physician examined the man’s head as it fell. First, the eyelids and lips went into spasm, then the man’s face relaxed and the eyes turned up. The doctor then called out the man’s name. He saw the eyelids lift, and their gaze met. As the eyes closed once more, the doctor repeated his call, and once more got the same response. ‘I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me,’ he reported. Current medical understanding is that a severed head can remain conscious until lack of blood and oxygen cause the brain to shut down, which may indeed take quite a few seconds. (credit:Getty stock)
6. Galton(06 of08)
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The Victorian polymath Sir Francis Galton was a tireless measurer of people. He toured the towns and cities of Britain surreptitiously assessing the beauty of their womenfolk. At a dull lecture, he whiled away the time by deriving a ‘boredom index’ by measuring the rate at which people were fidgeting. He used the new technique of photography in prisons and lunatic asylums in an attempt to discover the essence of the criminal or lunatic look. His method was to make composite images that were averages of all his subjects – a project we now recognize as futile. He was more successful in introducing the concept of fingerprinting and many statistical methods which we continue to use today.
7. X-rays(07 of08)
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Doctors, scientists – and the rest of us – have always been frustrated that it is impossible to see what is going on inside the body without cutting it open and doing harm. So the discovery of X-rays, by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen in 1896, was greeted with enormous popular enthusiasm. This image shows an X-ray of Frau Röntgen’s hand with the bones made visible for the first time (and her wedding ring). The technology was immediately applied in medicine, but more surprisingly home amateurs also rigged up their own X-ray apparatus. Meanwhile, William Hearst asked Thomas Edison if he could X-ray the brain. Edison obligingly tried, using the assistant as his subject, but could not capture an image.
8. Pioneer plaque(08 of08)
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Realizing that the Pioneer spacecraft sent to investigate the outer planets would sail on beyond the solar system, NASA thought it would be a good idea to tell any alien civilization that might intercept it something about us. This plaque was designed to do the job. It shows some scientific facts we have discovered, along with a representation of our species. The artist’s first design showed the man and woman holding hands, but this version was ruled out because it was felt that aliens might conclude that humans are hermaphroditic organisms that do not use sexual reproduction. As it is, the woman is shown without a vagina. Even this censorship was not enough for some newspapers, which reprinted the image with the remaining sexual characteristics edited out.

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