The Anatomy Lesson (23 page)

My father performed yeoman’s work in that garden, weeding wild grasses from the beds and deadheading overripe blooms. In the winter months, when the flower beds were fallow, he worked for the chief anatomist, Petrus Pauw, who liked to decorate the theater there with all kinds of frightful sights.

He had ten human skeletons: a skeleton rider on his skeleton horse, a skeleton playing the angel of death, a fateful scythe in his hand. A skeleton man and skeleton mate, side by side at a fruit-laden apple tree: the bony Adam and Eve. Six more around the amphitheater hoisted flags with deadly reminders in Latin:
Mors ultima linea rerum
(Death is the final end). One carried Horace’s dictum,
Pulvis et umbra sumus
(We are but dust and shadow). I was only a boy, but I remember Pauw’s chamber as well as my childhood cupboard bed. All my darkest nightmares came from there.

Both my parents died in a single week during the great pox of
1616. The only reason I lived on was fright. One day I found my parents both abed, their faces pale and hollowed, red blisters covering their necks and arms. My mother told me to stay away: “A monster has come,” she said. “Quick, escape to the woods. We will come find you.” I did as she said; I ran away and made my home in the woods for a week, terrified that the monster would get me. At last I got so hungry I had to go home. When I returned their bodies were already gone and a foreign woman was tending our hearth. I ran to Pauw, the only other person I knew. The great anatomist took me in as an additional set of hands.

Pauw didn’t make me do much more than carry water and hold plants while he gave his famous lessons in botany. He preferred to do things by himself—things like cutting and bottling specimens. In spite of his preaching about how death was always among us, I never imagined I’d lose him, too. But he died at his desk as he was painting one of his banners. It would’ve said
Mors ultima ratio
, “Death is the final accounting.” I was the one who found him, his face on his desk, his nose and cheeks covered with the black ink that had spilled from his pot.

I was alone there in the anatomical theater for a couple of weeks, sleeping in one of the skeleton boxes, before the successor came. He was Otto van Heurne, the one they call Heurnius, and he adopted me as if I were just another oddity in the
anatomicum
. He was a much more gentle soul than Pauw, and he moved Pauw’s dusty skeletons and their moralizing banners upstairs.

Then he filled the anatomical theater with actual wonders: rocks and shells, coins and butterflies, Roman busts and burial urns, heads of Greek goddesses, carved African elephant tusks, wooden oars painted by South American tribes, ancient idols, whale bones, Japanese utensils for serving tea. If I stood in the center of Van Heurne’s
universe, the entirety of the world seemed to spin around me, from the archangels in the heavens, through the celestial dome, right down to the stones and rocks under Lucifer’s feet.

Heurne persuaded merchants, sailors, and even ship surgeons to bring us earthly goods; and in this way, he taught me the rituals of my current faith: acquisitiveness.

If I’d once been afraid of death, who had taken three parents from me in two years’ time, Heurnius’s influence taught me to cultivate a pleased fascination with the dark messenger. Among the oddities and rarities that filled our chambers, Van Heurne kept specimens of the human dead. He bought dead children from an Englishman in Amsterdam, he asked his wonder hunters to seek for him the bodies of a giant. He was drawn to the ways of ancient Egypt, where it was believed that one never died but was simply “transfigured.” He loved especially to collect mummies in sarcophagi.

As Leiden’s chief anatomist, he also liked to examine the freshly dead. It was my job to fetch bodies for him. I was in my teens, and he sent me traveling the country freely by myself. Though the corpse cart emitted an awful stench, it didn’t seem to prevent me from finding plenty of willing ladies.

The years with Heurnius passed quickly, but after nearly a decade pushing that corpse cart, it was time for me to make my way in the world on my own. I was just about to turn eighteen when I had the idea to come to Amsterdam and become a dealer using what skills he’d taught me. Soon enough I would buy a canal house and marry myself a beautiful Amsterdam girl.

We parted as father and son—in tears—and he gave me a purse and told me to waste no time in meeting the anatomist at the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild. I secretly hoped that I wouldn’t have to push the corpse cart anymore, so I avoided making that contact.
But by then it was already 1629 and Amsterdam was bustling with hungry curio dealers. I tried to sustain myself on buying and selling alone, but there was too much competition on the wharves and I was a mere Leidener fighting every other Amsterdam rogue for a steady supply of wonders. I was down to my last five stivers when Tulp came looking for me.

Since then, I’ve been his porter and body bearer and curator and culler. He is no Heurnius—no Heurnius, indeed. He keeps me busy with his chores while he works on the grand scale of moral philosophy, and yet he still counts all his coins very carefully. And though he has a small collection of his own curios, he is no hoarder like Pauw or Van Heurne. In the off-season, when the anatomies aren’t in session, he lets me use the theater to display my wonders, and he pays for the quayside stables, too. He has asked me to procure for him an ape from the Australasias.

So now you see how whimsical this life can be? If I’d walked through the wood on my own two feet and come upon a crossing, I might have chosen the right path and not the left, but I was mounted upon an ass, which took its own haphazard course, so I landed where I am, as a collector of live animals and dead men.

On the stairs winding down from the anatomical theater to the guildhall door, I said a prayer to my maker that the crowd had dispersed. Those who pray for only their own sake are rarely rewarded, though, and I was not so lucky either. The door, I swear, was bulging against the weight of that mob. They were pushing, punching, kicking, leaning into it, and their shouts were just as heavy as their hands. It is not a small door, you know, and the iron locks and
latches were made by the city’s best smiths. There must have been some thousand men out there trying to break it down.

I grabbed what was at hand—a long stick, a chair, a rug—and jammed them against the door, then said another hopeless prayer. I knew they’d find a way to get through; I only knew not when.

I ran up the stairs, locking doors at each landing and trying to shore up the final door to the anatomy hall. Soon, very soon, Tulp would take the center platform of the anatomy theater and begin his lecture. He would need me to act as his assistant. I would need to be inside. But I just ran up and down the stairs in a frenzy, trying to find a way to bolster our locks, to secure the doors, to prevent the throngs. It was only a matter of time before that whole crowd burst in.

Most excellent and ornate men of Amsterdam: Honorable Burgomaster Bicker, Amsterdam burghers, gentlemen of the stadtholder’s court, magistrates, inspectors
Collegii Medici
, physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, apprentices, and public visitors to our chamber, on behalf of the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild, it is my greatest honor to welcome you all to the Amsterdam
theatrum anatomicum
on this, the opening night of the winter festival 1632.

At the request of the governors of our noble guild, I do humbly come before you to offer my annual lecture on the Human Body and the Fabric of Nature. Tonight, gentlemen, we commence the anatomical demonstration that will be the centerpiece of our city-wide fête. This is an occasion of unparalleled import for the town of Amsterdam and the Republic of Holland. Here shall we turn the true eye of scientia to man’s earthly form, so that we may come to know our place in God’s great universe through extensive ocular testimony, lecture, and debate.

Our anatomical lesson shall be followed by a banquet for our guild members and honored guests in the great hall in the Waag’s second tower. Our lecture will resume again tomorrow evening and continue throughout the week for five or six more evenings here in this tower. But later tonight the whole town will join together for public feasting and a spectacular torch parade through town, beginning in front of the Waag, continuing down the Nes, returning up the Damrak, and ending with fireworks in Dam Square.

I am Dr. Nicolaes Pieterszoon Tulpius, a son of Leiden. During the course of these proceedings, you may address me as Dr. Tulp or Tulpius. This occasion marks the second anniversary of my term as Amsterdam anatomist, lecturer, and praelector of our guild.

That guild of which I speak is one of the most highly respected of its kind in all Europe. Our
schul anatomicum
dates back to 1550, when we presented our first autopsia at the convent of the Eleven Thousand Maidens at Sint Ursula the Divine. The skin of the cadaver used in that effort—that of Suster Luyt, an executed thief—was carefully removed and treated and is currently exhibited in our guildhall, should any among you like to see it. Today, our guild doth represent eighty registered
doctoris medicinae
, two hundred and fifty barber-surgeons, and three hundred and ten apothecaries, providing treatment to one hundred and ten thousand residents of Amsterdam.

I count here at least a dozen members of our famed guild, including Warden Jacob Janszoon de Wit; Warden Hartman Hartmanszoon; Matthijs Calkoen; and our prized new apprentices, Adriaen Slabbraen and Jacob Block.

Gentlemen, 1632 is truly an annus mirabilis for Amsterdam. It has long been said that our city is strong in commerce but in all intellectual endeavors we are overpassed by Leiden, our neighbor
town to the south and the home to a great university. This year, my friends, Amsterdam will rectify that state of affairs. In a mere three months’ time, the new Atheneum Illustre, our very own university, will open right here in Old Town at the end of the Kloveniersburgwal, led by Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild member Caspar Barlaeus. The Atheneum shall be devoted to pursuits of all scientia, Latin, geologic arts, and, of course, natural philosophy. The Atheneum shall prove to the world that there is no place more illustrious on this globe than Amsterdam, and I know there are many among us tonight who would contribute to that honorable goal.

Ours is a city of rebirth, reclaimed from floodwaters and built upon the tireless industry of our engineers and craftsmen. Nowhere is our progress better represented than here, in the
theatrum anatomicum
. Even today, the great anatomists of Padua must conduct dissections in that city’s concealed cellars, as the Vatican holds our scientia to be heretical. That church has silenced our friend and fellow philosopher Galileo Galilei, who proposes the view that the sun doth not move, but that earth revolves about it.

I would like to say, on behalf of the governors of our guild: let good Galilei come to Amsterdam, and we shall welcome him and his Copernican views! For ours is a free city, where the greatest minds of Europe may join together and celebrate true wisdom. See among us tonight, gentleman, that our town is already a haven for great thinkers. We have with us this very evening our dear friend and fellow philosopher René Descartes from Paris, who honors us with his presence in our humble anatomical theater. Please join me in welcoming him, sires, for he is an amateur anatomist in his own right.

Paris, Padua, Genoa, Venice, and Antwerp—all these cities may compete for prominence, my friends, but none matches Amsterdam’s
independence; our social, economic, intellectual liberty. We have among our citizens some of the greatest minds of all Europe, learned and skillful anatomists, painters, architects, draftsmen, engineers.

I observe among us tonight many of these dignitaries. Some of you I do regret I do not yet know, but throughout these proceedings you may think of this dissection theater as my living room.

Do not laugh, sires, for though we are in the company of death, yet we do celebrate life and all of God’s glories.

Before me lies the body of a notorious criminal hanged by the neck this very day in front of city hall. Sentenced to death by four lord mayors and the honorable magistrates of Amsterdam, many of whom sit among us tonight, for misdeeds too numerous to count, the convict was penitent as he was led to the scaffold. With his final breaths he uttered the words, “May God have mercy on my eternal soul.”