Flexor digiroum superficialis!
The scientific dissection of human bodies has had a long and storied history of being condemned. The original Hippocratic Oath forbade the “use of the knife,” one of those quaint clauses that are now swept under the rug – like that bit about how medical education should be delivered “without fee or covenant.” Roman law forbade human dissection, so Galen had to make do with examining monkeys. Even from the late medieval period onwards, when dissections became accepted, they were still back-alley affairs, with cadavers limited to the corpses of murderers or other low criminals, and enmeshed in a black market in cadavers and body parts. (You could probably make a heck of a movie about anatomists in the early 19th century – scientific fervor, personal ambition, and the intersection of learned academics with the sordid underworld, maybe culminating in the Burke and Hare murders. I’d watch it, anyway.)
Routine dissection is a very novel idea, something that we find very much counterintuitive, and the only reason it happens at all is that there’s a sufficiently big incentive – learning about anatomy that way saves lives. And the corollary of that old taboo is that we didn’t evolve to intuitively comprehend the workings of the human body either. There was no reason to. Until the antiseptic age of Lister et al, surgery usually did more harm than good, and any weakening in our instinctive aversion to cutting up corpses runs the risk of weakening our aversion to harming live people as well. Better to have humans with strong anti-cutting-up-other-humans instinct, and leave them ignorant of what’s going on under the hood.
At the end of our anatomy course, this evolutionary heritage leaves me in the odd position of intellectually understanding what’s inside the human body, without really viscerally believing it in everyday life. I can see airplanes and computers and imagine the complex machinery that powers them, but it takes a lot of effort and mental abstraction to look at someone’s hand and see the intricate meshwork of tendons, or at someone’s face and see the zygomatic arch curving away behind the cheek. It’s much easier to slip into instinctive mode, just rely on our highly evolved facilities for detecting facial expression, and regard people as composed of Essence of Human, powered by élan vital.
Speaking of the face, the first thing we did in our first lab was to cover up our cadaver’s face, hands, and feet – ostensibly to prevent further decay but I suspect also to soothe our jitters by obscuring the most human-like part of the body. And it worked shockingly well – the mood immediately went from somber and respectful to practical and even gung-ho, and by the second session most of the camraderie, levity, and friendly competitiveness of our class was back in the room. Again, it makes sense that the mind would use the face and hand as a proxy for “this is a human,” rather than tacking on expensive mental modules to ID humans more rigorously. But it’s still surprising that covering less than 10% of the skin surface area of a human can suddenly turn it into a laboratory apparatus.
As we were dissecting, it also struck me that although there was huge variation in the size and proportions of internal organs, none of us had any aesthetic response to this diversity whatsoever. This is weird, considering how painstakingly precise we are at evaluating people’s facial symmetry and external body shape – judging miniscule differences to mean the difference between transcendent beauty and horrifying repugnance. The aesthetic sense of human beauty feels like a very important, essential difference between people, one that can massively change the trajectory of lives. But seeing this internal variation really brought home that it’s merely an algorithm for evaluating genetic potential, tailor-made for a bunch of primitives that hadn’t invented blood tests and DNA sequencing yet. Judging people by looks – a universal human compulsion – is not only shallow in the sense that it’s evaluating people based on things besides their thoughts and actions, but also literally shallow in the sense that you’re only looking at surface information that happened to be available thousands of generations ago, ignoring the biochemistry and hidden anatomy that is just as relevant to someone’s biological fitness as high cheekbones or a distinguished jaw.
Anatomy, like quantum physics, is one of those fields where our rationally derived knowledge violently contradicts our evolved instincts. We tend to view the human body as a single essential thing, and place a lot of emotional weight on our observations of superficial things that were the only data our ancestors could observe. I expect that as I am exposed to more and more medical knowledge, I’ll eventually adapt more and more to thinking like a reductionist doctor. But for now, interesting things are happening at the science/monkeybrain interface.
