The third plastic page reveals lungs, heart, large blood vessels,
pancreas, and kidneys. I flip back and forth, memorizing the numbered
organs and their habitations, not sure if they are interconnected, but
riveted by the thought that the guts and organs all have their own purpose.
The last sheet is mostly skeleton and nerves, and as I turn it, I see the back
side of the body. To my boyish glee, I find muscle number 159, gluteus
maximus, which sounds like a forbidden term.
As I stare at the images I can’t see how food gets from the mouth to the
stomach, but the accompanying text tells me the esophagus serves as the
conduit for liquids and chewed-up bits, and the small intestine absorbs the
food particles, which are further broken down by the digestive enzymes
from the pancreas. Whatever isn’t broken down and absorbed moves on to
the large intestine, where water is drawn away, leaving “waste.” My grade
school mind wonders, is “waste” the same thing as “poop?”
Nowhere else in this encyclopedia is there such a specialized set of
illustrations, and the message is clear to me: the human body is the most
important subject in all these volumes. Other topics still pique my interest,
but these anatomical drawings will always be my greatest fascination. In
fact, I can’t drift too far away from them; returning often to these acetate
sheets.
In the 1400s, Gutenberg invented the printing press, Constantinople fell to
the Turks, Jan Hus and Joan of Arc were burned at the stake, the Medici
rose to power, Columbus sailed to the New World, the Jews were expelled
from Spain during the Inquisition, and the word “discovery” was coined.
When Columbus stumbled upon the New World in October 1492, he had
no word to describe the action of “encountering an unknown world.”
Columbus recorded the accounts of his voyage in Spanish and Latin, but
only Portuguese had the word, discobrir. Prior to the late 1400s, authors
struggled to convey the concept of invention or discovery, and would rely
upon paraphrases such as, “a new technique that never existed
previously.”^1
David Wootton, in The Invention of Science, posits:
The discovery of America in 1492 created a new enterprise
that intellectuals could engage in: the discovery of new
knowledge. This enterprise required that certain social and