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11 April 2012
The Weekender

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It is the winter of 1810 and James Barry, medical and literary student of the University of Edinburgh, has just attended his first lecture in anatomical dissection with his tutor, the famously 'horrid' Mr Fyfe. His sickened body hastens through the streets away from Fyfe's dissection room as if he is pursued by death and her grotesque procession. Yet his mind races back to the scene he has just left, drawn by an intoxicating concoction of horror and curiosity.

He recalls the scene like a demonic dream. A room of instruments and shadows, the temperature of a meat-safe. A place between the artist's studio and the butcher's shop. The air clammy with malodorous condensation. Mr Fyfe's three greenhorn students huddle in a group, uncertain of the etiquette for approaching the dissecting table on which a body is laid out beneath greasy sheeting. Fyfe ushers them forward, stationing each with a clear view - and smell - of the cadaver. This uncomfortably intimate proximity to a fresh corpse not yet three days old and of uncertain origin is the privilege the students have paid for in signing up with Fyfe as private pupils. A select audience of young gentlemen with the best view in an exclusive house, suddenly and horribly fearful of seeing what their money has paid for.

The terrifying experience is optional. Practical dissection is not a compulsory part of the medical degree for which Barry registered. While required to be proficient in written and spoken Latin, classics and philosophy, he does not have to do this practical piece.' He could qualify by learning his anatomy from lavishly printed textbooks. But James Barry has a particular fascination with the study of anatomy, with the folds and secrets of the flesh. He breathes hard through his mouth, fighting back panic as Fyfe lifts the sheet. The tutor reveals a loose architecture of bones held together with a worn tarpaulin of skin like an old, patched sail clinging respectfully to the mainmast in memory of prouder times. Age and the diminution of the body in death compose his first impressions. Barry struggles to translate the clean and figuratively precise lines of his anatomical textbooks into the regular landscape of the purplish swollen body laid out before him. These and his childhood imaginings, swathed in Catholicism, had left him vaguely expectant that a dissection corpse would be luminous and sepulchral, modest even. In reality, the raw material for the surgeon's knives and saws is grey, graceless and lumpen.

Heart thumping, temperature rising with the bile in his throat in this claustrophobic space the only heat he can feel is his own. Yet in Fyfe's chilly candlelit rooms James Barry's cold sweat of dread anticipation turns to the flushed rush of heated fascination. The lamplit faces of the students begin to shine with a tincture of curiosity, bravado and fear as Fyfe cauterizes the body for the instruction of his gentlemen students. He talks in a clear, neutral tone aimed at reassurance as he makes his first incision through the skin of the corpse, along the clavicum and top of the sternum in order to demonstrate to them the anatomy of the neck and throat. As he makes another incision from the top of the sternum to the chin, Barry's startled attention is drawn to the face of the corpse. Stripped of the animation of everyday life it is a face unsexed.

The blade sinks into the flesh and heavy blood seeps up against the knife. Fyfe draws up the tough fascia with his forceps, and begins to describe the anatomical map of muscle and glands within. The external body disappears. Barry's fascination deepens as the body is opened and splayed out into a three-dimensional space under his gaze. Fyfe lifts skin and fascia. Inky blood wells over the slashed binding of heavy skin; the body discloses its interior. It is confusing. Without the boundary of the skin to navigate by, the eye loses its bearings. A chaotic topography reigns within. Barry wonders how he will ever learn to distinguish the fleshy fibres, superfluous membranes, tendons, tissue, arteries, nerves and vessels sketched by the tip of Fyfe's knife. The organs that make so much difference to life are grey and indistinguishable in death.

The flint slish of his tutor's knife is hypnotic. Barry cannot take his eyes from the complicated, messy and stinking body stretched before him. The stench saturates the air. It is unimaginably foul. As Fyfe wipes unguent fluids from his hand and reaches for a saw, Barry becomes conscious of a curious new emotion - the absence of any appropriate feeling of horror. This then is the state of 'necessary inhumanity' required to attain this knowledge.

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? Penguin Books Limited 2002

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