Notes of an Anatomist by F. Gonzalez-Crussi: book review

Notes of an Anatomist (1984, 2009 edition) is written by a practicing pathologist, a person who studies diseases through the examination of body tissue, cells, and body fluids. Gonzalez-Crussi’s specialty is human anatomy – the study of body parts. That means the study of human organs and the structure of the body. The book, Notes of an Anatomist, is a series of medical essays.

Gonzalez-Crussi starts with the history of embalming – with the origins from Egypt as spiritual and for the dead, to modern day techniques that are more for a profitable business and for the living “to remove the harrowing aspects of death, to expunge its painful appearance …” As he points out, people in America are likely to live closer to a funeral home than to a police station. He is naturally skeptical about extolling embalming, but is “not ready to condemn the practice either” while predicting the rise of cremation and other forms of “closure."

He also discusses the parts of the body that, over the course of history and in novels and other writing, are either ennobled (such as the heart and brain) or vilified (such as the liver) or treated with indifference or “invisibility” (such as the thyroid gland) which are “too humble to be surrounded by mystery and superstition.” There is a large section on ‘the nose’ which he describes as “the true repository of individual identity” – the “nose is destiny.”

But what body part does an anatomist prefer? He is rather particular about the backside, the buttocks - “it is actually a crossroads of cellular life, a cosmopolis of the human economy, a kaleidoscopic center of growth and potential energy … as if the rearend were the great planifier and mastermind of the body.” And from the buttocks, he discusses tails. There have been people who have had some sort of a tail – a caudal appendix “though innocuous … is equally spectacular.” The appearance of a tail on a human makes the rearend “the palastra for the mighty clash between creationists and evolutionists.”

The author performs autopsies to study causes of death, and writes of the death of a man due to a fly-blown infestation, “Epidemiologists have estimated that one-quarter of all mortality in the world is fly related.”

The most interesting chapter is Twins in which he discusses identical twins and conjoined twins” “Twin fusion is, of course, compatible with longevity.”  He writes of old techniques, such as Chinese coroners who used to test for poisons by placing a fistful of rice in the cadaver’s mouth, then feeding it to chickens to observe untoward effects, to the modern technology of today.

How does his work, especially in conducting autopsies, define his personality, he asks? He sees the world “inside out.” Causes of death are not only seen from the outside (bruises, lacerations, entry wounds) but also from the inside (smoking, alcohol, disease, poisoning, age, trauma). Pathologists have been described as “the weevil in the flour sac of Medicine” but he sees that his task is “to explain the living being by examination of the corpse” in which “the moment of death is restored to scientific respectability.”

It is not a macabre read, nor does the author aim to shock. Gonzalez-Crussi aims to show the body from a number of perspectives: the artist’s, those interested in the inner workings of the body, from a scientific inquiry, and the body as part of the environment. It is eloquently written, with a richness of imagery and intellectual thought.