Literary Parallels

Because it seemed more than a little disturbing that so many future physicians had behaved in such a gross, grotesque manner in anatomy class, we wondered how some other people had acted when contemplating—let alone dissectinga corpse. We sought insights from the past and the present.

The Corpse at the Banquet

The ancient Egyptians, according to Herodotus, purposely contemplated the image of a corpse to spur themselves on to renewed sensuous and sensual enjoyment. "In social meetings among the rich, when the banquet is ended, a servant carries round to the several guests a coffin, in which there is a wooden image of a corpse, carved and painted to resemble nature as nearly as possible. . . . As he shows it to each guest in turn, the servant says, "Gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be;"^[1] The grotesqueness of such a display at a banquet was surpassed only by the reaction it was meant to solicit in the beholders: in the face of death, the heady and deliberate pursuit of pleasure.

Memento Mori, Danse Macabre, and Charnel Houses

The corpse was also an important symbol for Christians of the late Middle Ages. But unlike the ancient Egyptians, who were advised to pursue pleasure after contemplating a corpse, Christians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were ad-

monished by the death-depicting art and literature of their era to fear death and damnation and to think about their eternal salvation. "Memento mori," they were constantly warned, "Remember that you must die." A glance at what life was like during the times of Francois Villon (1432?–1463?), one of the finest poets of fifteenth-century France, may help explain this preoccupation with death and cadavers.

When Villon was born in Paris in 1431 or 1432, France had been besieged for about a century by famines, massacres, and the Hundred Years' War (Joan of Arc was burned in 1431). The country had been assaulted as well by plague, smallpox, and other illnesses, which continued to take their toll. In August 1438, Marie de France, daughter of Charles VI, died from the epidemic (probably of smallpox) that was beginning in spread to Paris. "All the doctors who made the post-mortem died too. . . . In the rest of the city more than 45,000 succumbed."^[2]

During Villon's era, therefore, men were accustomed to contemplating death almost daily. Proximity did not make it less fearsome. Indeed, the art and literature of the day deliberately emphasized the terrifying aspects of death. From the end of the fourteenth century until well into the sixteenth century, tombs were "decorated with hideous images of naked, rotted corpses, their feet and fists rigid, their mouths gaping, their entrails devoured by worms."^[3] When Cardinal Lagrange died in Avignon in 1402, his tomb (now displayed in the Musée Calvet, Avignon) bore a bas-relief of a mummified body—half skeleton and half decomposed corpse—and an inscription that warned, "Wretch, what reason hast thou to be proud? Ashes thou art, and soon thou wilt be like me, a fetid corpse, feeding ground for worms."^[4] In this atmosphere of death and decay, the art and verses of the danse macabre flourished.

The medieval danse macabre—the dance of the dead or the dance of death—was an allegorical representation of death taking hold of people of all ranks and conditions. A cadaverlike figure of death was paired with each living person. The dead led the dance and were the only ones

depicted as dancing, while the living appeared almost lifeless, as though frozen in their tracks by fear. The purpose of the dance was to edify through pictures and words: to serve, in effect, as a memento mori.

In the fifteenth century, murals were a common form of the danse macabre. In fact, "the most popular representation known to the Middle Ages" was the danse macabre painted in 1424–25 on the inside wall of the cemetery of the Holy Innocents (Les Saints-Innocents) in Paris.^[5] This mural consisted of a long line of about thirty pictures depicting the whole range of human society. In the verses accompanying the scenes, Death addressed each living person, and each responded in turn. The voice of Death was didactic, satiric, or ironic; for example, to the portly abbot, Death said, "The fattest rot soonest."^[6] Because the verses of this danse macabre were very popular, they were translated into "English, Low German, Latin . . . and Catalan."^[7]

The Paris cemetery where this celebrated mural was painted reveals much about fifteenth-century attitudes toward cadavers, for just above the famous danse macabre were the charnel houses (or charnels), ossuaries of exhumed human bones displayed for public view. As in many other churchyards of the time, the charnels were built along the cemetery's inside walls. After the fourteenth century and its epidemic of the Black Death, the burial ground had become overcrowded, and so the "custom . . . [had arisen] of disinterring the dead and putting their remains in charnel houses to make room for newcomers. . . . [R]ich and poor were treated alike."^[8] Every day crowds of people saw the disinterred bones in the charnels of the Holy Innocents because in the fifteenth century this cemetery, "the biggest and best known in Paris,"^[9] was not only a sacred burying ground but also a forum, a public square, a marketplace, and a promenade for prostitutes. "There were small booths below the famous charnel houses, in which books, cloth, and ironmongery were sold. The vendors exposed their wares to the public view on the tombs."^[10] "You would find little shops there near the charnel houses and prostitutes beneath the

arcades. . . . Even celebrations were held in that place. To such an extent had the horrible become familiar."^[11]

Villon gives further insights into this cadaver-haunted era.

FranÇois Villon and the "Ballade of the Hanged Men"

That Villon's poetry is haunted by figures of death is not surprising considering his era and his life. Although he had received bachelor's and master's degrees from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris (the latter making him a junior member of the clergy), the poet became a derelict, a thief, and the killer of a priest. After several imprisonments he was condemned at about age thirty to be "hanged and strangled" ("pendu et estrangléF ").^[12] He was reprieved, however, and banished from Paris for ten years. We have no record of what became of him after that.

In his poetry, Villon reveals his fears not only of death's physical aspects (e.g., how it destroys the human body) but also of hell. Here is how he depicts death's fearful physical effects on a cadaver:

Death makes him shudder, turn pallid hues,
Makes his veins grow taut and his nose sag,
Makes his neck puff out and his skin flag;
It lengthens and swells his joints and sinews.^[13]

Elsewhere, however, the poet makes us see and feel his faith that if he repents, God will forgive and welcome him.

In some of his finest work, Villon actually makes us feel both his fear and his faith by means of shifting tones: now clinical, grotesque, or desensitized; now pathetic, imploring, or prayerful; now ironically humorous; now poignantly serious. In this way he evokes contradictory reactions in the reader: distance and closeness, coldness and compassion, a feeling of difference and a feeling of fraternity. Through his shifting tones, Villon at times makes his reader feel almost one with him. He does this, for example, in his famous "Ballade of the Hanged Men," often called "The Villon Epitaph."

Condemned to be hanged, the poet depicts himself and those hanged with him as cadavers decaying on the gibbet. The voice speaking throughout the ballade is that of the hanged men's cadavers.

Ballade of the Hanged Men

Human brothers who live when our lives are through,
Do not harden your hearts against us, for
If you have pity on us creatures poor,
The sooner will God have mercy on you.
You see us hanging here, five, six or so,CR>As for our flesh, which we nourished overmuch,
It grew rotten and was devoured long ago,
And we, the bones, are becoming ashes and dust.
Let no one laugh at our sad fall:
But pray that God absolve us all!

If we call you brothers, you should not be
Contemptuous, even though
We were killed by law. However, you know,
Not all men judge soberly;
Because we are dead, make our apology
To the son of the Virgin Mary,
So that He not staunch His grace for us,
Preserving us from hellfire fulminous.
We are dead; let no one catcall;
But pray that God absolve us all!

We' ve been drenched by the rain that purifies,
And by the sun blackened and desiccated:
Magpies and crows have gouged out our eyes
And our beards and eyebrows eradicated.
We're never seated at any time at all,
Transported now here, now there, unceasingly,
According to the wind's wanton call,
More pecked by birds than a thimble by a needle.
And so, do not join our confraternity;
But pray that God absolve us all!

Prince Jesus, who over us all has mastery,
Keep Hell from having our seigniory:

Let 's have no debts or doings therewithal.
This, men, is not a jest at all;
But pray that God absolve us all!^[14]

While contemplating the image of his own cadaver, Villon mingles emotional distance with pathos, a clinical detachment with a fraternal embracing of all men. Although he believes that he will be hanged, he knows—and makes his readers remember-that we shall all die (though not necessarily on a gibbet), that our bodies will also grow rotten, and our bones become "ashes and dust." The "Ballade of the Hanged Men" is, therefore, the poet-cadaver's lesson to the living: we should see in the cadaver's state the image of our own sorry—and inevitable—fate.

With the image of Villon's cadaver in mind, we thought back to that anatomy class. And we began to wonder how some physician-writers had reacted to contact with, or contemplation of, the cadaver.

FranÇois Rabelais

FranÇois Rabelais (1494?–1553) was a Doctor of Medicine and practicing physician, an ordained priest, the father of three illegitimate children, and the author of the famed comic saga Gargantua and Pantagruel . He received his medical doctorate from, and for a time taught at, the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, which was, along with the Paris Faculty of Medicine, the best in France at that time.

During Rabelais's era, the church was very powerful and, in general, against innovation. The "Sorbonne—the dominant Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris . . . [was] usually supported by the conservative Parlement of Paris. . . . [Together] they furiously attacked all innovators, often with success. Burning at the stake was not infrequent."^[15] Despite the fact that the church was firmly opposed to dissections of human cadavers (they were actually forbidden in Paris),^[16] Rabelais daringly performed such dis-

sections. In 1537, in fact, six years before the great anatomist Andreas Vesalius would publish De humani corporis fabrica , Rabelais began his summer course at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine by publicly dissecting the corpse of a hanged man and accompanying his dissection with a scientific explanation. We know about this from a Latin poem by Rabelais's friend, Étienne Dolet (who was burned at the stake in 1546 for heresy, "mainly for translating . . . [a work] in which the immortality of the soul is denied").^[17]

In Dolet's poem, the cadaver dissected by Rabelais speaks, saying how fortunate he is to be dissected publicly because "a most learned physician" ("medicus doctissimus ") explains to the "crowded audience" how "beautifully, and skillfully, and with what order Nature made the body of man." For all these reasons, the cadaver concludes, instead of being "food for the fierce crows, and a plaything for the blasts of the winds," he overflows "with glory" and "with honors" ("circumfluoque / Jam gloria," "Honoribus circumfluo ").^[18]

Rabelais's daring dissections of cadavers and probings into the mysteries of human anatomy overflow into his art but in a strange way: through grotesque or comically obscene humor. This kind of humor—which recalls in some ways that last day of anatomy class—seeks at once to amuse and to shock. In so doing, it deflects the reader's emotions from feelings of pain or sympathy to a stance of desensitized distance. This is evident in several of Rabelais's battle scenes, where the doctor-writer obviously delights in describing the parts of human anatomy severed by the sword. For example, Friar John of the Hashes knocked one enemy's

head into pieces along the lamboidal suture. . . . [Other enemies] Friar John impaled up the arse with his staff. . . . [He] showed his muscular strength by running . . . [some people] through the chest by way of the mediastine to the heart. . . . Others he struck on the ballocks and pierced their bum-gut. It was, believe me, the most hideous spectacle that ever was seen.^[19]

Should one cry or laugh at the sight of a cadaver? Both, Rabelais suggests. We laugh at Friar John's battle-dissections, but we also realize, with the doctor-writer, that this was "the most hideous spectacle that ever was seen." Ambivalent impressions strike the reader: the horror of war along with the anatomy of dismembered, disemboweled corpses, but also the grotesque, obscene, and fantastic flights of imagination that take off from the cadaver. The horrible is wed to the humorous, the real to the fantastic. Because of these ambivalent joinings, horror becomes a ground for laughter and the real becomes unreal or ridiculous. The reader is both shocked and amused, horrified and heartened; in other words, the reader is sensitized and desensitized, pained and anesthetized, burdened and relieved. As a result of the laughter that Rabelais's grotesque humor generates, desensitization, numbness, and relief prevail. We laugh at what—when seen in normal, rather than in grotesque, terms—might makeus quake or cry.

The same question—should one laugh or cry at the sight of a cadaver?—is posed in another way by Gargantua when his wife, Badebec, also a giant, dies giving birth to their giant son, Pantagruel. In reality, what can be sadder than a woman dying in childbirth? Appropriately, then, Gargantua begins by mourning for his wife. Even as he grieves, however, his thoughts turn into comically grotesque and obscene images because, as he starts to think about what he will miss in Badebec, his ideas center on her sex. Since Badebec was a giant, the proportions of her "cunt" are enormous and therefore ludicrous.

"Shall I weep?" said . . . [Gargantua]. "Yes. Why then? Because my wife who was so good is dead. . . . This is a loss beyond all calculation! 0 my God, . . . why didst Thou not send death to me before sending it to her? For to live without her is no more than a lingering death. Ah, Badebec, my sweet, my darling, my little . . . [cunt] [mon petit con ]—hers was a good three acres and two roods in size for all that—my tenderling, . . . never shall I see you again.^[20]

The grotesque humor here springs from tragedy. It reminds us, too, that along with being mind, spirit, and soul, human beings are flesh and blood. Thus, Gargantua brings us back to the corporeal and earthy. Further, by centering on the reproductive organs, Gargantua's images divert his thoughts—and ours—from Badebec's cadaver and turn them instead toward thoughts of life, laughter, and virility.

Very soon after this meditation, Gargantua's fears about his own death surface. When they do, he decides that he must live and not mourn since he also will die some day, perhaps even soon. Now he must rejoice in his son's new life. Seen in this light, the grotesque in Rabelais—and probably elsewhere, as on that last day of anatomy class—is often an earthy, human defense against the fear of death.

When confronting death, disease, and the cadaver, we have seen, Rabelais sought relief in a kind of medicinal laughter that could soothe grief and help heal the spirit, soul, and body. His laughter is highly ambivalent, expressing both sorrow and joy, tragedy and comedy, fear and the conquest of fear, a vision of death and a vision of life. By means of his ambivalent humor, terrifying things—including death and the cadaver—become comically grotesque, ridiculous, and thus unworthy of being feared. In the comic grotesque, therefore, we note—and welcome—the defeat of fear.

Because we also wanted some more modern insights, we turned to two twentieth-century physician-writers, Gottfried Benn and Richard Selzer, for their reactions to death and the cadaver.

Gottfried Benn

In many of his poems. Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) seems numbed, cold, and crudely, often offensively, clinical or grotesque. Not infrequently, the sexual in his writings appears grotesque, as in "Man and Woman Go through the Cancer Ward." A man speaks; perhaps he is the doctor himself. We feel the speaker's anxieties and anger as he describes the

patients on the cancer ward who are in the process of becoming cadavers.

The man:
Here in this row are wombs that have decayed,
and in this row are breasts that have decayed.
Bed beside stinking bed. Hourly the sisters change.

Come, quickly lift up this coverlet.
Look, this great mass of fat and ugly humours
was precious to a man once, and
meant ecstasy and home.

Come, now look at the scars upon this breast.
Do you feel the rosary of small soft knots?
Feel it, no fear. The flesh yields and is numb.

The flesh this speaker calls numb is not as numb as the voice of the poet-narrator. He continues:

Here's one who bleeds as though from thirty bodies.
No one has so much blood.
They had to cut
a child from this one, from her cancerous womb.

They let them sleep. All day, all night.—They tell
the newcomers: here sleep will make you well.—But
Sundays
one rouses them a bit for visitors.—

They take a little nourishment. Their backs
are sore. You see the flies. Sometimes
the sisters— wash them. As one washes benches.—

In the last stanza, the death-absorbed narrator suddenly reaches out through his shocking language for something that is almost hopeful or transcendent. Envisioning these cancer-ridden bodies as cadavers now, he imagines them sinking into the earth and mingling, in that way, with the larger forces of nature and of life. He begins the last stanza rather morbidly, with the image of the grave rising about each bed, but he ends the stanza almost lyrically, or at least fertilely, with his vision of the "sap" that "prepares to flow" and the voice of the earth that "calls":

Here the grave rises up about each bed.
And flesh is leveled down to earth. The fire
burns out. And sap prepares to flow. Earth calls.—^[21]

From the cold, clinical, ironical, and grotesque, the narrator has moved to a vision of life and nature. Once more, the grotesque reveals ambivalence: fear striving for the defeat of fear; pain looking for healing; a vision of death reaching for a vision of life.

In Benn's poem we contemplated human beings becoming corpses. In the next doctor-writer's work, we are forced to contemplate the corpse itself.

Richard Selzer

In "The Corpse," Richard Selzer relates in clinical, often grotesque, detail what happens to a dead body when it is prepared for embalming or autopsy or is buried with no preparation. Each time, Selzer's language aims to shock and grip. Often, he addresses the reader directly. You cannot escape from his words or from the image of the corpse.

When a corpse is prepared for embalming or autopsy, Selzer writes, it is cleaned out by the suction trocar, a hollow steel rod with a sharp tip at one end and rubber tubing at the other. The rubber tubing is placed in the sink to empty. Suddenly, through the surgeon-narrator's language, you become the cadaver lying on the table, waiting for the trocar to pierce and empty you .

A man stands by the table upon which you lie. He opens the faucet in the sink, steps forward, raises the trocar. It is a ritual spear. . . . Two inches to the left and two inches above your navel is the place of entry. (Feel it on yourself.) The technician raises this thing and aims for the spot. He must be strong, and his cheeks shake with the thrust. . . .

Wound most horrible! It is a goring.^[22]

Before long, Selzer says, your stomach, heart, intestines, scrotum, and testicles are emptied. Seeking distance from

the horrors it is describing, Selzer's language—like Rabelais's and Benn's—uses clinical terms, irony, and obscene and grotesque images that often have sexual overtones.

The head of the trocar disappears beneath the skin. Deeper and deeper until the body wall is penetrated. Another thrust. . . .

Look how the poker rides—high and swift and lubricious. . . . [T]he trocar is drawn . . . into the right chamber of the heart. . . . Thrust and pull, thrust and pull. . . .

The heart is empty. . . . Thunk, thunk. . . : the scrotum is skewered, the testicles smashed, ablaze with their billion whiptail jots. All, all into the sink—and then to the sewer. This is the ultimate suck.^[23]

Soon, along with some forty other corpses all suspended in a perfect row, you are dunked into the tank of embalming fluid. Only, for Selzer, the tank appears like a "casserole of chow mein," and the corpses plunged therein are grotesque, comical, and pitiful. And you are one of the corpses.

Forty feet long, four wide, and seven deep is the tank. . . . It is . . . covered by domed metal, handle at the apex, like a casserole of chow mein. . . . Above the fluid, a center rod. . . suspends [the bodies] . . . in a perfect row; forty soldiers standing in the bath. . . . Upon each head, worn with a certain nonchalance, are the tongs, the headdress of this terrible tribe. . . . Each set of tongs is . . . hung from the center rod by a pulley. In this way the bodies can be skimmed back and forth during the process. . . .

We end skin overcoats on a rack.

A slow current catches the brine and your body sways ever so slightly, keeping time.^[24]

Are you repelled by this preserving process used for both embalming and autopsy? The doctor offers you another choice. You may be buried in the ground as you are. Only, he warns:

Now you are meat, meat at room temperature. . . . There is to be a feast. . . . The guests have already arrived, numberless bacteria that had, in life, dwelt in saprophytic harmony with their host. Their turn now! Charged, they press against the membrane barriers, . . . devouring, belching gas—a gas that puffs eyelids, cheeks, abdomen into bladders of murderous vapor. . . . Your swollen belly bursts. . . . You are becoming gravy. Arriving for the banquet late, . . . and all the more ravenous for it, are the twin sisters Calliphora and Lucilia, the omnipresent greenbottle flies. . . .^[25]

Considering Selzer's depictions of what happens to a corpse when it is embalmed or when it putrefies in the earth, it is not surprising that he envisions some other, more uplifting, end for his own cadaver. What does he wish for himself?

"I want . . . to be buried—unembalmed and unboxed—at the foot of a tree. Soon I melt and seep into the ground, to be drawn up by the roots. Straight to the top, strung in the crown, answering the air. There would be the singing of birds, the applause of wings."^[26]

Even though Selzer waxes poetical here as he imagines his body joining with nature and achieving thereby a kind of lyrical and spiritual glory, we cannot forget, as this surgeon himself taught us, that if he is to be thus buried at the foot of a tree, his body will putrefy and become, before it attains to the treetop, a feast for bacteria, insects, and worms. Still, Selzer's lyrical vision offers him—and us—an escape from the clinical, grotesque realities he has so vividly impressed on us. What is more, his romantic words describing his joining with nature recall, in some ways, Benn's final images of sap and earth in his poem that until then had been clinical, grotesque, and ironic. Both Benn and Selzer, therefore, seem to be reaching through the image of the cadaver toward a vision of transcendence or at least of life. And Rabelais, through his grotesque and often obscene humor, did the same.