Flights

THE HISTORY OF FILIP VERHEYEN, WRITTEN BY HIS STUDENT AND CONFIDANT, WILLEM VAN HORSSEN

My teacher and master was born in 1648 in Flanders. His parents’ home looked like any other Flemish home. It was built of wood and covered by a roof of reeds cut evenly just like young Filip’s fringe. The flooring had been very recently done with clay bricks, and now members of the family declared their presence to one another with the clatter of their clogs. On Sunday the clogs were sometimes exchanged for leather shoes, and down the long straight road lined with poplars the three Verheyens would head out for church in Verrebroek. There they would take their places and await the pastor. Their work-worn hands would reach in gratitude for the prayer books; the thin sheets and tiny letters would strengthen their belief that they were more enduring than the fragile life of man. The Verrebroek pastor always began his sermon with the words ‘Vanitas vanitatum’. It could be taken as a greeting, and in fact, that is how little Filip always understood it.

Filip was a peaceful, quiet boy. He helped his father on the farm, but it soon became clear that he would not follow in his footsteps. He would not pour milk out every morning and mix it with the powder from calves’ stomachs in order to shape giant wheels of cheese, nor rake out the hay into even piles. He would not observe in early spring whether in the furrows of ploughed earth there hadn’t collected any water. The pastor of Verrebroek made his parents understand that Filip was gifted enough that it would be worth educating him further after he completed his studies at the church school. And thus the fourteen-year-old boy began his education at the Heilige-Drievuldigheids lyceum, where he demonstrated his outstanding ability at drawing.

If it is true that there are people who see the small things, and those who see only big things, then I am certain that Verheyen belonged to that first group. I even think that his body from the beginning felt best in that particular position – inclined over a table, with his legs resting on the bars of his chair, his spine curved into a bow and his hands furnished with a feather pen that took not even the slightest interest in far-reaching goals, aiming close, within the kingdom of detail, the cosmos of little details, dashes and points, where the image is born. Etching and mezzotint – leaving in metal little traces, signs, the drawing of the smooth indifference surface of a metal sheet, ageing it till it became wise. He told me that the obverse always took him by surprise and confirmed his conviction that left and right are two completely different dimensions: their existence ought in fact to show us the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality.

And although he was so adept at drawing, so occupied with engraving and etching, dyeing and printing, in his twenties Verheyen set out for Leiden to study theology, and like the pastor from Verrebroek, his mentor, become a pastor.

But even earlier – as he told me in connection with that excellent microscope that stood on his table – every so often that pastor would take him on short expeditions, a few miles down battered roads, to see a particular grinder of lenses, a brash Jew cursed out by his own, as he called them. This man rented out rooms in a stone house and seemed so exceptional that each such expedition was for Verheyen a great event, though he was too young to take part in any conversations, which he could only barely understand. The grinder apparently comported himself in a rather exotic, somewhat eccentric manner. He had a long gown, and on his head a tall stiff cap, which he never removed. He looked like a line, like a vertical pointer – so Filip told me and joked that if you were to put that oddball in a field he might serve the people as a sundial. Different people gathered at his house, merchants, students and professors, who would sit around the wooden table beneath a large willow tree and have endless discussions. From time to time the host or one of the guests would give a lecture merely in order to get the discussion to flare up again. Filip recalled that the host spoke as though he were reading, fluidly, without mumbling. He’d build long sentences, the meaning of which would immediately escape the little boy, but the speaker governed them perfectly. The pastor and Filip would always bring something to eat. Their host would supply them with wine, which he lavishly diluted with water. This was as much as Verheyen remembered from these meetings, and Spinoza remained for all time his master, whom he would read and battle fervently. Perhaps it was these meetings with this ordered mind, with his power of thought and need to understand, that prompted young Filip to study theology in Leiden.

I am certain that we cannot recognize the fate grooved into the other side of life for us by the divine Engravers. They must appear to us only once they’ve taken a form intelligible to mankind, in black and white. God writes with his left hand and in mirror writing.

During his second year at university, in 1676, on a May evening, Filip, going up the narrow stairs to the little floor he rented from a certain widow, tore his trousers on a nail, also – as he saw only the following day – harmlessly injuring his calf. A red mark was left on his skin, drawn by the sharp part of the nail, a dash of a few centimetres adorned by drops of blood in little points; the careless movement of the Engraver on the delicate human body. After a few days a fever had begun to consume him.

When the widow finally called the medic, it turned out that the little wound had already been infected; its edges kindled to red and had swollen. The medic prescribed poultices and broth for strength, but already by the next evening it had become clear that there would be no way to stop the process, and that the leg would have to be cut off just below the knee.

‘Not a week goes by that I don’t have to amputate something off someone. You still have another leg,’ the medic apparently said to cheer up Filip. The medic would later become his friend, and he was my uncle, Dirk Kerkrinck, for whom Filip executed quite recently several anatomical engravings. ‘You’ll have a wooden crutch made, and at worst you’ll just be a bit noisier than you have been until now.’

Kerkrinck had been a student of Frederik Ruysch, the best anatomist in the Netherlands, and perhaps the world, so the amputation was an exemplary one and came off perfectly. The part was divided from the whole smoothly, the bone sawed evenly, the blood vessels closed, cauterized precisely with a glowing hot rod. Before the operation, the patient grabbed his future friend by the sleeve and begged him to preserve the removed leg. He had always been very religious, and he must have taken it literally that in our resurrected bodies we would rise from the grave in our physical form, with Christ’s coming. He told me later that at the time he was very fearful that his leg might rise on its own; he wanted his body to be buried, when the time came, as a whole. Had it been an ordinary medic and not my uncle – had it been someone off the street, an ordinary barber-surgeon, the kind who cuts off warts and pulls out teeth – he would not, of course, have fulfilled this bizarre request. Ordinarily the severed limb would travel, shrouded in cloth, to the cemetery, where with solemnity, though with no religious formalities, it would be placed in a small hole, which they wouldn’t even mark out. But my uncle, while the patient slept, knocked out by rectified spirit, took meticulous care of the leg. Above all with the aid of an injection of a substance, the composition of which his master had kept a secret, he removed from the blood and lymphatic vessels all the contaminated blood and infiltrations of gangrene. When the limb had been thus drained, he placed it in a glass vessel filled with a balm of Nantes brandy and black pepper, which was to permanently protect it from destruction. When Filip awoke from his alcoholized anaesthesia, his friend showed him the leg drowned in brandy, just as mothers are shown newborns after giving birth.

Verheyen recuperated slowly, in the attic of a little house down one of the small streets of Leiden, where he was boarding with the widow. It was she who took care of him. Who knows how this would all have ended had she not been there. The patient became quite depressed, as a matter of fact; it’s hard to say whether it was because of the ceaseless pain of the healing wound, or just because of his new situation. At the age of twenty-eight he had, after all, become an invalid, and his theological studies had thus ceased to make sense – without his leg, he could not be a pastor. He did not allow anyone to notify his parents, overwhelmed by shame at disappointing them. Dirk would pay him visits, as well as two colleagues drawn – it seems – less by the suffering of the patient than they were by the presence on his headboard of the amputated limb. It appeared this scrap of the human body was now living its own life as a specimen, submerged in alcohol, in a perpetual haze, dreaming its own dreams of running, of wet morning grass, of warm sand on the beach. A few fellow theology students also came to see him, and to them Filip ultimately confessed that he would not be returning to his studies.

When the guests would leave, the owner of the house, the widow, Mrs Fleur – whom I later met and consider an angel – would appear in Filip’s room. Filip lived in her home for quite a few more years, until he bought a house in Rijnsburg and settled down there for good. She’d bring with her a basin and a tin jug filled with hot water. Although the patient no longer had a fever, and no blood seeped out from his wound now, the woman would delicately wash off his leg and help the student bathe. She would then dress him in a clean shirt and trousers. The left legs of his trousers she had already sewn for him, and everything she touched with her clever hands looked natural, in order, as though that were precisely how God had created it, as though Filip Verheyen had been born without his left leg. When he had to get up to use the chamber pot, he would lean on the strong shoulder of the widow, which at first was exceedingly awkward, but then became natural, like everything connected with her. After several weeks she moved him downstairs, where he ate with her and her two children at the heavy wood kitchen table. She was tall and sturdy. She had wild, curly blonde hair, like many Flemish women, which she concealed beneath a linen cap, though there was always one lock of it that escaped onto her back or over her forehead. I suspect that at night, as the children slept their innocent sleep, she would go to him as she did when with the chamber pot, and get into his bed. And I don’t see anything wrong in it, for I believe that people ought to support each other in any way they can.

In the autumn, when the wound had healed completely, and upon the stump there remained only a reddish trace, Filip Verheyen, tapping his peg over the uneven paving stones of Leiden, went every morning to lectures at the university medical centre, where he began his studies of anatomy.

He soon became one of the most respected students, for he was able to make use of his drawing talent like no one else in order to transfer onto paper what at first glance to the inexperienced eye looked like a chaos of tissues in the human body – tendons, blood vessels and nerves. He also copied Vesalius’ famous hundred-year-old atlas and acquitted himself very nicely of this exercise. It was the best introduction to his own work, the result of which would make him famous. To many of his students, among whom I, too, numbered, he had a paternal relationship – full of love, but also stern. Under his supervision we carried out autopsies, and then his attentive eye and expert hand would lead us down the paths of that most complicated labyrinth. Students valued his firmness and detailed knowledge. They watched the swift movements of his tracer as though witnessing a miracle. Drawing is never reproducing – in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you’re looking at.

He had always been rather taciturn, and today with the perspective of time I can say that he was also somehow absent, absorbed in himself. Gradually he gave up his lectures, shifting over fully to lonely work in his workshop. I would visit him often in his home in Rijnsburg. I was pleased to bring him news from the city, gossip and sensational stories from the university, but I was unsettled to notice that he had become increasingly obsessed with a single topic. His leg, dismantled into parts, investigated in as much detail as possible, always stood in its jar on his headboard or stretched scarily out on the table. When I realized that I was the only person he had any contact with, I also understood that Filip had crossed over an invisible boundary, a point of no return.

On that day in November our barge moored at Herengracht in Amsterdam in the early afternoon, and we went straight from the harbour to our destination. Since it was already the start of winter, the canals did not stink as mercilessly as in summer, and it was pleasant to walk in the warm milky fog, which before our eyes floated upwards, revealing a serene autumn sky. We turned onto one of the narrow side streets of the Jewish neighbourhood and wanted to stop somewhere for a beer. It was a good thing we had had a bountiful breakfast in Leiden, because all the inns we passed were overflowing with people, and we would have waited a long time to be served.

At the market, among the stalls, there is the Measures Building, where unloaded goods are weighed. In one of the towers enterprising Ruysch has arranged this theatrum, and this is where we arrived somewhat earlier than the hour printed on our tickets. Though none of the eager participants had yet been admitted inside, several little groups of viewers had gathered nonetheless at the entrance. I looked them over with interest, for the appearance and garments of many of them were testament to Professor Ruysch’s fame having long since crossed the borders of the Netherlands. I heard conversations in foreign languages, saw French wigs on people’s heads and English lace cuffs protruding from the sleeves of doublets. Many students had also come; they must have had cheaper, unassigned seats, because they were already crowding around the entrance, wanting to secure the best positions.

People we knew from when Filip was more active at the university – high-ranking members of the municipal council or the surgeons’ guild, interested in what Ruysch was about to show us, what he’d come up with – approached us constantly. Then my uncle, the imprimateur of the tickets, arrived, dressed immaculately in black, and greeted Filip effusively.

The place looked like an amphitheatre with benches set all around, all the way up, almost to the ceiling. It was well lit and carefully prepared for the spectacle. Along the walls down the entrance and the room itself were placed the skeletons of animals, bones connected by wires supported by discreet structures, giving the impression that the skeletons might at any moment come back to life. There were also two human skeletons – one on his knees, with his hands raised in prayer, and the other in a pensive pose, head resting on knees, the little bones of which were meticulously connected by wires.

When the audience, whispering and shuffling their shoes, entered the room and one by one took the seats indicated for them by their tickets, they also passed by Ruysch’s famous compositions exhibited in display cabinets, elegant sculptures. ‘Death does not spare even youth,’ I read on the sign beneath one of them – it represented two fetus skeletons playing together: delicate cream-coloured little bones, blistery little skulls planted around an elevation built from the equally delicate bones of small hands, rib cages. And symmetrically to them another tableau had been arranged, little human skeletons around four months old standing on an elevation of (as far as I could tell) gallstones covered in prepared and dried blood vessels (on the thickest such branch sat a stuffed canary). The skeleton on the left side held a miniature sickle while the other, in a forlorn pose, brought to its empty eye sockets a handkerchief made out of some sort of dried tissue, maybe lung? Someone’s sensitive hand had decorated the whole in salmon lace and summed it up in elegant lettering on a silk ribbon: ‘Why would we miss the things of this world?’, which meant it would have been difficult to be overcome by the sight. I was moved by the presentation before it had even begun, because it seemed to me I was seeing the tender evidence not of death, but of some death in miniature. How could they have truly died without ever having been born?

We took our places in the first row along with the other distinguished guests.

On the central table, amidst nervous calling whispers, lay the body already, ready for dissection, still covered in a piece of light-coloured shiny fabric that barely gave a sense of its shape. It had already been announced on our tickets, like a delicious dish, spécialité de la maison: ‘Body prepared thanks to the scientific talent of Dr Ruysch for preserving and reproducing the natural colour and consistency, such that it may seem fresh and almost living.’ Ruysch kept the components of this extraordinary tincture in strict secret; no doubt that substance was an elaboration of the one that was still conserving Filip Verheyen’s leg.

Soon every place had been occupied. Finally those in charge admitted a few dozen students; most of them were foreign, and they stood now around the walls amongst the skeletons in a strange sort of complicity with them, stretching out their necks just to see anything at all. Shortly before the performance, in the first row, the best places were taken by several elegant men dressed in foreign attire.

Ruysch came out with two helpers. It was they who, after a short introduction by the professor, simultaneously lifted the covering on both sides and revealed the body.

No surprise that from all sides we heard a gasp.

It was the body of a slender young woman; as far as I know, only the second such to be presented for a public dissection. Until now, anatomy lessons were only permitted on male bodies. My uncle whispered to us that this was some Italian whore who had killed her newborn child. Her swarthy, smooth, perfect skin looked from here, from the first row, from barely a metre away, flushed and fresh. The lobes of her ears and the toes on her feet were lightly red, as though she’d lain too long in a cold room and frozen. She was no doubt covered in some sort of oil, or perhaps this was part of Ruysch’s preservation treatments, because she was glowing. From the ribs down, her stomach fell, and over this petite olive-skinned body rose the mound of Venus, as though the most important, most significant bone in the system. Even for me, used as I was to dissection, it was a moving sight. Normally dissections were performed upon the bodies of convicts who had not taken care of themselves, playing with their lives and health. What was shocking was the perfection of this body, and here I truly had to appreciate Ruysch’s care and foresight for having managed to get it in such a good state and prepared it so well.

Ruysch commenced the lesson, addressing those gathered, thoughtfully mentioning the title of all the attending doctors of medicine, professors of anatomy, surgeons and officials.

‘Greetings, gentlemen, and I thank you for coming in such numbers. Thanks to the generosity of our magistrate I reveal to your eyes what nature has hidden in our bodies. And not at all out of a desire to unload bad feelings on this poor body, nor from a need to punish it for the act it committed, but rather so that we might discover ourselves, and the way in which we were made by the hand of the Creator.’

He told us that the body was two years old already, which means that during that time it had lain in the morgue, and that thanks to the method he invented, he had been able to preserve it fresh until today. When I looked this way at the naked, defenceless, beautiful body, my throat tightened, and after all I am not someone on whom the sight of human corpses makes any impression. But it made me think that we could have anything, be anyone if – as they say – we wanted it badly enough; for man stands at the very centre of creation, and our world is the human world, not the divine world nor anyone else’s. There is only one thing we cannot have – eternal life, and, by God, from whence did that concept come into our heads, that idea of being immortal?

He introduced the first cut expertly along the abdominal wall; somewhere on the right side of the auditorium someone apparently fell ill, because for a moment there was a murmur in the audience.

‘This young woman was hung,’ said Ruysch, and he raised the body to show us the neck; indeed, you could see a horizontal trace, barely a dash, hard to believe it might have been the reason for her death.

At first he focused on the organs in the abdominal cavity. He discussed in detail the digestive system, but before he moved on to the heart, he let us look into everything below, where from beneath the mount shone the uterus, enlarged after giving birth. And everything he did, even to us, his colleagues, belonging to the same guild, looked like a magic show. The movements of his bright, slender hands were circular, fluid, like on those fairground wizards. Our eyes followed him, fascinated. That small body opened up before the audience, revealed its secrets, trustingly, believing that such hands would not do it harm. Ruysch’s commentary was brief, coherent and comprehensible. He even joked, though gracefully, as though without lessening his dignity. Then I also understood the essence of this presentation, its popularity, Ruysch with these round gestures was transforming the human essence into a body and before our eyes undressing it of mystery; breaking it down into prime factors as though taking apart a complicated clock. The threat of death slipped away. There’s nothing to be afraid of. We are a mechanism, something like Huygens’ clock.

After the show people left in silence and fascination, and what remained of the body was mercifully covered with that same fabric. But after just a moment, outside, where the sun had completely chased away the clouds, they began to talk more boldly, and the audience – including ourselves – went to the magistrate for the banquet prepared for this occasion.

Filip remained gloomy and silent and did not appear at all interested in the delicious food, wine and tobacco. To tell the truth, I wasn’t in the mood myself. It would be wrong to think that we anatomists approach each dissection as though it were part of our daily order. Sometimes, like today, something is ‘raised’, something I myself call ‘the truth of the body’, an odd conviction that despite the evidence of death, despite the absence of a soul, the body left to itself is a kind of intensive whole. Of course the dead body is not alive; what I mean is more the fact of it remaining in its form. Form is in its way alive.

That lesson of Ruysch’s marked the beginning of the winter season, and now at De Waag there would be regular lectures, discussions, demonstrations of vivisections of animals, both for students and for the public. And if circumstances supply fresh bodies, public autopsies performed by other anatomists would also take place. Only Ruysch was able, for now, to prepare a body in advance, even two years in advance, as he’d said today (something I still find hard to believe) – and only he did not have to fear the summer heat.

Were it not for the fact that I accompanied him the next day on his way home – first by boat, then on foot, I would never have found out what it was that Filip Verheyen suffered from. But even so, what I heard from him seems strange and extraordinary to me. As a doctor and anatomist I had already heard several times about this phenomenon, but I had always attributed such pains to oversensitivity of the nerves, an exuberant imagination. Meanwhile I had known Filip for years, and no one could equal his exactitude of mind, nor the reliability of his observations and his judgements. An intellect applying the correct method can attain true and useful knowledge about the tiniest details of the world through the aid of its own distinct and clear ideas – this he taught us at the same university where fifteen years before the mathematician Descartes had lectured. Because God, perfect to the utmost degree, who provided us after all with cognitive faculties, cannot be a deceiver; if we use those faculties correctly, we must reach truth.

The pains came at night, starting a few weeks after the operation, as his body was relaxing and slipping across the uncertain boundary between waking and sleep, filled with travelling unsettling images, the travellers inside the sleeping mind. He would have the impression that his left leg was numb, and that he absolutely had to get it into the right position – he felt his toes tingling, an unpleasant sensation. He fidgeted, half-conscious. He wanted to move his toes, but the unperformability of that movement awoke him completely. He would sit on the bed, tear the blanket off himself and look at the aching place – it was some thirty centimetres below the knee, there over the rumbled sheet. He would close his eyes and try to scratch it, but he touched nothing, his fingers combed the void in despair, giving no relief to Verheyen.

Once, in a fit of despair, when the pain and itching were driving him mad, he stood and with trembling hands lit a candle. Hopping on one foot, he moved to the table the vessel with the cut-off leg, which Fleur, unable to convince him to transfer it to the attic, had covered with a flowery shawl. He extracted the limb and in the candlelight tried to locate in it the reason for the pain. The leg now seemed somewhat smaller, the skin browned by the brandy, but the toenails remained raised, pearlescent, and Verheyen had the impression they had grown. He sat down on the floor, stretched his legs out before him, and laid the amputated limb on the place just below his left knee. He closed his eyes and groped for the painful place. His hand touched a cold piece of flesh – but could not reach the pain.

Verheyen worked on his own atlas of the human body methodically and persistently.

First the dissection – the careful preparation of a model to draw, the unveiling of some muscle, bundle of nerves, the extension of a blood vessel, the outstretching of the specimen in two-dimensional space, the reduction to four directions: up, down, left and right. He used minute wooden pins to help himself render the complex more transparent and clear. Only then would he emerge, carefully wash and dry his hands, change his surface clothing, and then return with the paper and graphite graver, in order to make order on paper.

He did the dissections sitting down, trying in vain to control bodily fluids that ruined the clarity and accuracy of the image. He transferred the details to paper in hurried sketches, and then, now in peace, he would revise them carefully, detail by detail, nerve by nerve, tendon by tendon.

Evidently the amputation strained his health, because he often suffered from weakness and melancholy. The pain of his left leg, which troubled him ceaselessly, he termed ‘phantom’, but he was afraid to mention it to anyone, suspecting that he was the victim of some nervous illusion or of madness. He would no doubt have lost his high position at the university had anyone found out about it. Very quickly he began working as a doctor and was accepted into the guild of surgeons. His lack of a leg meant that he was called more often than others for any kind of amputation, as though his personal experience guaranteed the success of the operation, or as though a legless surgeon brought – if it could be called this – good fortune in disease. He published particular works on the anatomy of muscles and tendons. When in 1689 he was offered the position of rector of the university, he moved to Leuven, taking in his luggage the tightly packed vessel with the leg in its rolls of linen.

It was I, Willem van Horssen, who served as messenger, when several years later in 1693 I was sent by the printer to show Verheyen the fat edition of his first book – the great anatomical atlas, Corporis Humani Anatomia, still damp from the printer’s ink. It contained twenty years’ worth of his work. Every etching, perfectly executed, transparent and clear, was supplemented by an explanatory text, so that it seemed that in this volume the human body became some sort of mysterious procedure etched down to its very essence, relieved of easily spoiling blood, lymphs, those suspect fluids, the roar of life, that its perfect order had been revealed in the absolute silence of black and white. Anatomia brought him fame, and after a few years the work was revised in an even larger print run and became a textbook.

The last time I went to Filip Verheyen’s was in November 1710, called by his servant. I found my friend in a very poor state and it was difficult to communicate with him. He was sitting at the south window, looking through it, but I had no doubt that the only thing this man could see were his own internal images. He didn’t really react to my entrance, just looked at me without interest, nor any sort of gesture, then turned back to the window. On the table lay his leg, or what remained of it, for it had been taken apart into hundreds or thousands of little pieces, tendons, muscles and nerves broken down into their smallest components, all of which covered the whole surface of the table. His servant, a simple person from the country, was frightened. He was afraid to even go into his master’s room, and the whole while he gave me signs behind his back, silently commenting on his reactions, moving just his lips. I examined Filip as best I could, but the diagnosis wasn’t good – it seemed that his brain had stopped working and that he had fallen into some sort of apathy. I knew, of course, that he suffered attacks of melancholy; now the black bile had reached the level of his brain – perhaps because of those, as he called them, phantom pains. The last time I had brought him maps, for I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps. I prescribed him rich foods for strength, and rest.

At the end of January I learned that he had died and immediately hastened to Rijnsburg. I found his body already prepared for the funeral, washed and shaved, lying in a coffin. Around his cleaned-up home were some relatives from Leiden, and when I asked the servant about his leg, he only shrugged. The great table by the window had been scrubbed and washed with lye. When I tried to ask further what had become of that leg, which Filip had repeated so many times that he wanted buried with his body, the family dismissed me. He was buried without it.

By way of comfort and appeasement I was given a sizeable stack of Verheyen’s papers. The funeral took place on the twenty-ninth day of January in the abbey of Vlierbeek.