We took our places in the first row along with the other distinguished guests.
On the central table, amidst nervous calling whispers, lay the body already, ready for dissection, still covered in a piece of light-coloured shiny fabric that barely gave a sense of its shape. It had already been announced on our tickets, like a delicious dish, spécialité de la maison: ‘Body prepared thanks to the scientific talent of Dr Ruysch for preserving and reproducing the natural colour and consistency, such that it may seem fresh and almost living.’ Ruysch kept the components of this extraordinary tincture in strict secret; no doubt that substance was an elaboration of the one that was still conserving Filip Verheyen’s leg.
Soon every place had been occupied. Finally those in charge admitted a few dozen students; most of them were foreign, and they stood now around the walls amongst the skeletons in a strange sort of complicity with them, stretching out their necks just to see anything at all. Shortly before the performance, in the first row, the best places were taken by several elegant men dressed in foreign attire.
Ruysch came out with two helpers. It was they who, after a short introduction by the professor, simultaneously lifted the covering on both sides and revealed the body.
No surprise that from all sides we heard a gasp.
It was the body of a slender young woman; as far as I know, only the second such to be presented for a public dissection. Until now, anatomy lessons were only permitted on male bodies. My uncle whispered to us that this was some Italian whore who had killed her newborn child. Her swarthy, smooth, perfect skin looked from here, from the first row, from barely a metre away, flushed and fresh. The lobes of her ears and the toes on her feet were lightly red, as though she’d lain too long in a cold room and frozen. She was no doubt covered in some sort of oil, or perhaps this was part of Ruysch’s preservation treatments, because she was glowing. From the ribs down, her stomach fell, and over this petite olive-skinned body rose the mound of Venus, as though the most important, most significant bone in the system. Even for me, used as I was to dissection, it was a moving sight. Normally dissections were performed upon the bodies of convicts who had not taken care of themselves, playing with their lives and health. What was shocking was the perfection of this body, and here I truly had to appreciate Ruysch’s care and foresight for having managed to get it in such a good state and prepared it so well.
Ruysch commenced the lesson, addressing those gathered, thoughtfully mentioning the title of all the attending doctors of medicine, professors of anatomy, surgeons and officials.
‘Greetings, gentlemen, and I thank you for coming in such numbers. Thanks to the generosity of our magistrate I reveal to your eyes what nature has hidden in our bodies. And not at all out of a desire to unload bad feelings on this poor body, nor from a need to punish it for the act it committed, but rather so that we might discover ourselves, and the way in which we were made by the hand of the Creator.’
He told us that the body was two years old already, which means that during that time it had lain in the morgue, and that thanks to the method he invented, he had been able to preserve it fresh until today. When I looked this way at the naked, defenceless, beautiful body, my throat tightened, and after all I am not someone on whom the sight of human corpses makes any impression. But it made me think that we could have anything, be anyone if – as they say – we wanted it badly enough; for man stands at the very centre of creation, and our world is the human world, not the divine world nor anyone else’s. There is only one thing we cannot have – eternal life, and, by God, from whence did that concept come into our heads, that idea of being immortal?
He introduced the first cut expertly along the abdominal wall; somewhere on the right side of the auditorium someone apparently fell ill, because for a moment there was a murmur in the audience.
‘This young woman was hung,’ said Ruysch, and he raised the body to show us the neck; indeed, you could see a horizontal trace, barely a dash, hard to believe it might have been the reason for her death.
At first he focused on the organs in the abdominal cavity. He discussed in detail the digestive system, but before he moved on to the heart, he let us look into everything below, where from beneath the mount shone the uterus, enlarged after giving birth. And everything he did, even to us, his colleagues, belonging to the same guild, looked like a magic show. The movements of his bright, slender hands were circular, fluid, like on those fairground wizards. Our eyes followed him, fascinated. That small body opened up before the audience, revealed its secrets, trustingly, believing that such hands would not do it harm. Ruysch’s commentary was brief, coherent and comprehensible. He even joked, though gracefully, as though without lessening his dignity. Then I also understood the essence of this presentation, its popularity, Ruysch with these round gestures was transforming the human essence into a body and before our eyes undressing it of mystery; breaking it down into prime factors as though taking apart a complicated clock. The threat of death slipped away. There’s nothing to be afraid of. We are a mechanism, something like Huygens’ clock.
After the show people left in silence and fascination, and what remained of the body was mercifully covered with that same fabric. But after just a moment, outside, where the sun had completely chased away the clouds, they began to talk more boldly, and the audience – including ourselves – went to the magistrate for the banquet prepared for this occasion.
Filip remained gloomy and silent and did not appear at all interested in the delicious food, wine and tobacco. To tell the truth, I wasn’t in the mood myself. It would be wrong to think that we anatomists approach each dissection as though it were part of our daily order. Sometimes, like today, something is ‘raised’, something I myself call ‘the truth of the body’, an odd conviction that despite the evidence of death, despite the absence of a soul, the body left to itself is a kind of intensive whole. Of course the dead body is not alive; what I mean is more the fact of it remaining in its form. Form is in its way alive.
That lesson of Ruysch’s marked the beginning of the winter season, and now at De Waag there would be regular lectures, discussions, demonstrations of vivisections of animals, both for students and for the public. And if circumstances supply fresh bodies, public autopsies performed by other anatomists would also take place. Only Ruysch was able, for now, to prepare a body in advance, even two years in advance, as he’d said today (something I still find hard to believe) – and only he did not have to fear the summer heat.
Were it not for the fact that I accompanied him the next day on his way home – first by boat, then on foot, I would never have found out what it was that Filip Verheyen suffered from. But even so, what I heard from him seems strange and extraordinary to me. As a doctor and anatomist I had already heard several times about this phenomenon, but I had always attributed such pains to oversensitivity of the nerves, an exuberant imagination. Meanwhile I had known Filip for years, and no one could equal his exactitude of mind, nor the reliability of his observations and his judgements. An intellect applying the correct method can attain true and useful knowledge about the tiniest details of the world through the aid of its own distinct and clear ideas – this he taught us at the same university where fifteen years before the mathematician Descartes had lectured. Because God, perfect to the utmost degree, who provided us after all with cognitive faculties, cannot be a deceiver; if we use those faculties correctly, we must reach truth.