Perspectives
Book
This Mortal Coil: the Human
Body in History and Culture
Fay Bound Alberti. Oxford
University Press, 2016. Pp 304.
2000. ISBN 9780199599035
1598 www.thelancet.com Vol 389 April 22, 2017
Corporeal culture
For those of us outside of the medical
profession, the body is at once the
most mundane and most mysterious
of entities. We live with ours every
day, and yet we understand little
about what actually happens within
it. As long as we are well, we take it
for granted, assuming it will always
be that way; as soon as we are ill,
were on alert, perplexed, alarmed,
and even betrayed by this thing that
has suddenly become beyond our
control. Illness is the night-side of
life, Susan Sontag has written, that
foreign country that we all do our
best to forget aboutuntil we cant. paying attention to the
Fay Bound Albertis book, This Mortal
Coil: The Human Body in History and
Culture takes the human experience
of the body and its illnesses as its
subject, showing us how specialists
and laypeople alike have made sense
of corporeal existence from ancient
times to the present moment.
Albertis title signals the cultural
slant that guides the focus and terms
of her study: this mortal coil is the
body that Shakespeares Hamlet
wishes to shuffle off in his famous
To be or not to be soliloquy, that
consummate meditation on the thin
line between life and death. But, as
Alberti deftly shows, most of human
history has concerned itself not
with the annihilation of the body
but rather with its improvement.
Whether we look to literature, the
anatomical theatre, the laboratory, or
the sickbed, we find people struggling
to figure out how to get better, and to
understand why things went wrong
in the first place.
Divided into eight chapters, each
focused on a different organ or body
part, Albertis book offers readers a
history that is as much about cultural
beliefs as it is about medical science.
Central to the scientific history that
Alberti uncovers is a tale of increased
secularisation: what was once a sign
of Gods presence or a mark of spiritual
corruption becomes naturalised
through the discovery of neurons,
hormones, and a more sophisticated
anatomy. This is nowhere more true
than in the history of the mind
body relationship, which plays a
part in all of Albertis chapters but is
particularly central to her study of
the heart and brain. Here she focuses
Alongside these fascinating
cultural histories, Alberti gives
insight into how people
thought about the body by
in the age of industrialisation
metaphors they used to
describe it.
on how an organ like the heart might
go from being a space associated
with the self, with emotion, with
feeling, and with the soul to a mere
pump, subject to disease and decay
like any other physical organ. In her
treatment of the brain, she shows how
the inverse has taken place, with the
nervous system and its pathways and
ganglions now seeming to so many
to hold the key to emotions, the
personality, and the self. Throughout
she emphasises approaches and
studies that understand the body
holistically: for Alberti, its not so
much mind over matter, as it is mind
and matter.
Gender and race play a part in this
history. In her chapter on the female
breast, Alberti examines the history
of conditions such as hypomastia
and the role it has played in the
creation of a booming and largely
unregulated cosmetic surgery
industry. In Albertis account of the
vagina, she discovers how as early as
1559 doctors described the clitoris
as this so beautiful thing formed by
so great art, but how later medical
texts nevertheless minimised its
significance or omitted it entirely
from discussion. And in her chapter
on skin, she explores how 19th-
century scientists equated the fact
that they could not visibly observe
blushing in black people with the
belief that they did not possess
the refined moral feelings and
intellectual powers necessary to
produce this physiological response.
Alongside these fascinating cultural
histories, Alberti gives insight into
how people thought about the body
by paying attention to the metaphors
they used to describe it. Much of this
language is linked to technology:
the body becomes a mechanised
engine that needs to fuel up and
that can break down, and with
the development of electricity it
morphs into a system of circuits
that send information through the
nerves to the rest of the body like a
telegraph system.
One only wonders what
the rapid expansion of digital
technology today is doing to
the way we understand our own
psychophysiology: are our brains a
series of individual motherboards, or
are we all networked together, like
cloud computing? Alberti touches
on this briefly in her conclusion, but
I would have enjoyed hearing more
about this future of the body, as well
as how the experience of masculinity
(or indeed non-cisgender identity)
has been shaped through cultural
pressures and idealsperhaps
through organs such as the penis,
testes, or musculature. But this is
only to highlight how engrossing
and provocative Albertis story of the
body is, in that it leaves readers eager
for more.
Erin Sullivan
Shakespeare Institute, University of
Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK
e.sullivan@bham.ac.uk