The pains came at night, starting a few weeks after the operation, as his body was relaxing and slipping across the uncertain boundary between waking and sleep, filled with travelling unsettling images, the travellers inside the sleeping mind. He would have the impression that his left leg was numb, and that he absolutely had to get it into the right position – he felt his toes tingling, an unpleasant sensation. He fidgeted, half-conscious. He wanted to move his toes, but the unperformability of that movement awoke him completely. He would sit on the bed, tear the blanket off himself and look at the aching place – it was some thirty centimetres below the knee, there over the rumbled sheet. He would close his eyes and try to scratch it, but he touched nothing, his fingers combed the void in despair, giving no relief to Verheyen.
Once, in a fit of despair, when the pain and itching were driving him mad, he stood and with trembling hands lit a candle. Hopping on one foot, he moved to the table the vessel with the cut-off leg, which Fleur, unable to convince him to transfer it to the attic, had covered with a flowery shawl. He extracted the limb and in the candlelight tried to locate in it the reason for the pain. The leg now seemed somewhat smaller, the skin browned by the brandy, but the toenails remained raised, pearlescent, and Verheyen had the impression they had grown. He sat down on the floor, stretched his legs out before him, and laid the amputated limb on the place just below his left knee. He closed his eyes and groped for the painful place. His hand touched a cold piece of flesh – but could not reach the pain.
Verheyen worked on his own atlas of the human body methodically and persistently.
First the dissection – the careful preparation of a model to draw, the unveiling of some muscle, bundle of nerves, the extension of a blood vessel, the outstretching of the specimen in two-dimensional space, the reduction to four directions: up, down, left and right. He used minute wooden pins to help himself render the complex more transparent and clear. Only then would he emerge, carefully wash and dry his hands, change his surface clothing, and then return with the paper and graphite graver, in order to make order on paper.
He did the dissections sitting down, trying in vain to control bodily fluids that ruined the clarity and accuracy of the image. He transferred the details to paper in hurried sketches, and then, now in peace, he would revise them carefully, detail by detail, nerve by nerve, tendon by tendon.
Evidently the amputation strained his health, because he often suffered from weakness and melancholy. The pain of his left leg, which troubled him ceaselessly, he termed ‘phantom’, but he was afraid to mention it to anyone, suspecting that he was the victim of some nervous illusion or of madness. He would no doubt have lost his high position at the university had anyone found out about it. Very quickly he began working as a doctor and was accepted into the guild of surgeons. His lack of a leg meant that he was called more often than others for any kind of amputation, as though his personal experience guaranteed the success of the operation, or as though a legless surgeon brought – if it could be called this – good fortune in disease. He published particular works on the anatomy of muscles and tendons. When in 1689 he was offered the position of rector of the university, he moved to Leuven, taking in his luggage the tightly packed vessel with the leg in its rolls of linen.
It was I, Willem van Horssen, who served as messenger, when several years later in 1693 I was sent by the printer to show Verheyen the fat edition of his first book – the great anatomical atlas, Corporis Humani Anatomia, still damp from the printer’s ink. It contained twenty years’ worth of his work. Every etching, perfectly executed, transparent and clear, was supplemented by an explanatory text, so that it seemed that in this volume the human body became some sort of mysterious procedure etched down to its very essence, relieved of easily spoiling blood, lymphs, those suspect fluids, the roar of life, that its perfect order had been revealed in the absolute silence of black and white. Anatomia brought him fame, and after a few years the work was revised in an even larger print run and became a textbook.
The last time I went to Filip Verheyen’s was in November 1710, called by his servant. I found my friend in a very poor state and it was difficult to communicate with him. He was sitting at the south window, looking through it, but I had no doubt that the only thing this man could see were his own internal images. He didn’t really react to my entrance, just looked at me without interest, nor any sort of gesture, then turned back to the window. On the table lay his leg, or what remained of it, for it had been taken apart into hundreds or thousands of little pieces, tendons, muscles and nerves broken down into their smallest components, all of which covered the whole surface of the table. His servant, a simple person from the country, was frightened. He was afraid to even go into his master’s room, and the whole while he gave me signs behind his back, silently commenting on his reactions, moving just his lips. I examined Filip as best I could, but the diagnosis wasn’t good – it seemed that his brain had stopped working and that he had fallen into some sort of apathy. I knew, of course, that he suffered attacks of melancholy; now the black bile had reached the level of his brain – perhaps because of those, as he called them, phantom pains. The last time I had brought him maps, for I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps. I prescribed him rich foods for strength, and rest.
At the end of January I learned that he had died and immediately hastened to Rijnsburg. I found his body already prepared for the funeral, washed and shaved, lying in a coffin. Around his cleaned-up home were some relatives from Leiden, and when I asked the servant about his leg, he only shrugged. The great table by the window had been scrubbed and washed with lye. When I tried to ask further what had become of that leg, which Filip had repeated so many times that he wanted buried with his body, the family dismissed me. He was buried without it.
By way of comfort and appeasement I was given a sizeable stack of Verheyen’s papers. The funeral took place on the twenty-ninth day of January in the abbey of Vlierbeek.
LETTERS TO THE AMPUTATED LEG
The loose pages I received after Verheyen’s death put me in confusion. Throughout the last years of his life my teacher recorded his thoughts in the form of letters to a particular correspondent, a circumstance I’m certain anyone would deem sufficient proof of his madness. However when one carefully reads these hurried notes, which were almost certainly intended as an aidemémoire rather than for someone else’s eyes, one sees in them the record of a kind of journey to an unknown land and an attempt to sketch out its map.
I thought long and hard about what I ought to do with this unexpected inheritance, but I decided against its publication in any form. I, his student and friend, would prefer for him to be remembered as a wonderful anatomist and draftsman, the discoverer of the Achilles heel and several previously unnoticed parts of our body. I would prefer for us to remember his beautiful engravings and accept that it is impossible to understand everything of anyone else’s life. But to address the rumours that have been spreading after his death in Amsterdam and Leiden – that the master had gone mad – I wish to briefly present several excerpts from his papers here and demonstrate in so doing that he was not mad. I have no doubts, meanwhile, that Filip allowed himself to be overwhelmed by a particular obsession connected with his inexplicable pain. Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don’t know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way.