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A taxidermist who writes ‘essays’ on her blog about the 17th century anatomists and embalmers; an achondroplasic academic who works on the mathematics of quasicrystals; and a widowed sheep farmer who lost her stock during the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis in Cumbria -- how could they possibly have anything to do with each other, or with tulip fields and lacy sleeves and floating musical octopuses made of spider-silk? The answers, of course, lie within the pages of The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes, the writing of which led me to follow many fascinating lines of research – visiting exhibitions, museums, galleries and work-places in the Netherlands and the UK -- and to talk to many kind and generous people, who were often ‘expert practitioners’ in their subjects. Throughout the writing, several postcards and print-outs of images relevant to the novel lay on my desk – and some of them are so extraordinary and beautiful, or disturbing and thought-provoking, that I wanted to make them available to readers. I am extremely grateful to the organisations and individuals who have so generously allowed me to use these images on this website. Where stated the Copyright remains theirs. ‘An intriguing novel in a haunting setting, rich in texture, humorous and concerned, raising important questions about science and our relation to the natural world, to the individuals we know and to the communities we live in. A lovely book.’ Jenny Uglow ‘An exhilarating and compelling read. A powerful and haunting story of genetic difference, interwoven with maths, taxidermy, and the tragedy of foot and mouth disease.’ Professor Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate ‘A many-faceted book ... The account of the dreadful days of foot-and-mouth disease in the last epidemic is agonising and the Cumbrian accent is perfect.’ Jane Gardam ‘A charming, intelligent and engrossing book, with enough dark heart to drag it away from the domain of standard female fiction fare and into much more engaging territory. I found myself drawn in by the delicate prose and fascinating descriptions … an engrossing and enjoyable read.' Kat Arney, LabLit 'A rich, absorbing, intriguing novel ... All of (the characters) felt like real people, whom I would want to know. And they were dealing with authentic issues; from everyday problems like relationships and family rivalry to the impact of foot-and-mouth on the local Cumbrian community. ... An absorbing, clever writer ....' Mary Zacaroli, Oxford Times 'Ann Lingard skilfully weaves a handful of lives together ... This engrossing and unusual tale is a window on the soul... and highlights something no embalmer can preserve: what it means to be an ordinary human being.' Michael Brooks, New Scientist Dr Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) – anatomist, embalmer, man-midwife and praelector of the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild, botanist with an interest in insects ... The Surgeon’s Guild was housed in De Waag in Amsterdam. I was very fortunate to be able to see the painted heraldic shields of the surgeons, including the central shield for Frederik Ruysch himself, inside the roof of the restored Theatrum Anatomicum - because my good friend and former colleague, Dr Wil van der Knaap, was able to gain entrance for the two of us. (We went on to see the ’anatomy lesson’ paintings and the Museum Vrolik, and then to Leiden to the Anatomy Theatre and the Boerhaave Museum)
Ruysch sometimes referred to himself as a konstenaar, or artist, and his Wunderkammer -- of preserved plants and animals and human foetuses, dried, embalmed or fixed in alcohol, and his moralistic preparations and Tableaux of skeletons that were symbols of vanitas mundi -- was visited by many high-ranking academics and others, including Peter the Great (who eventually bought the collection). Cornelius Huyberts’ engravings of the Tableaux are preserved in the volumes of Ruysch’s Opera Omnia, the Thesauri, which I was able to examine in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Since then, photographs of all the pages of the Thesauri have become available on the website of the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médécine.
This Tableau is one of several showing Ruysch’s artistry in preparing tissues such as blood vessels and the mesenteric tissues from around the gut, and arranging them to represent handkerchiefs and trees and – more morbidly here – an opened tomb or sepulchre created from a preserved uterus, containing a foetus with a ‘crown of natural flowers’. The Scot William Hunter (1716-1783) was, like Ruysch, an anatomist, embalmer and man-midwife, and was also President of the Royal College of Surgeons in England. Remnants of his large anatomical museum – including the plaster casts of gravid uteri, and the bottles of human eyes mentioned in the essay Making Eyes - are now held at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum. His anatomy dissections and lectures, and his embalming methods that allowed long-term dissections of cadavers, were famous and led to many ground-breaking discoveries. It’s worth noting that his lectures and demonstrations to the Royal Academy of Arts on the importance of scientific observation and accurate interpretation are still very relevant to the work of writers and artists today! William Hunter’s younger brother John (1729-1793) was also a surgeon and anatomist and a naturalist, who accumulated his own large collection of animals and humans, both dead and alive, in his own museum. A large part of the collection remains in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
In the background are the bones of the feet and lower legs of Charles Byrne,‘the Giant O’Brien’ (died 1783), as recounted in the essay Copper Kettles by taxidermist Ruth Kowslowski in the novel: “Perhaps finally he has been able to smile at the thought that his story as well as his bones (and a portrait of his feet!) are still preserved and admired nearly 250 years later.” As for Ruysch’s children, Rachel Ruysch was not only adept at making lacy sleeves for embalmed babies, but became a highly-respected artist, preserving the images of flowers and insects and reptiles in the rich colours and deep textures of her still-life paintings. You can find portraits of Rachel Ruysch on the internet – and one of her oil-paintings is held at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
What was the significance of the post-cards on the Café Waag table? And what was so special about the brick patterns inside De Waag? Frans wrote to me that this postcard (which I bought in 2001) is “the best selling tulip image card in Holland. The publisher and I were astonished about this. We thought before that it would do well, but definitely not that it would become the best selling of all tulip fields”. I am delighted to be able to reproduce it here! The answer to the questions is that Lisa, Stefan, Kees and their colleagues - mathematicians, theoretical physicists, astronomers - were in Amsterdam for a conference on patterning and quasicrystal structure – and like crystallographers and the artist Escher before them, were working on the practice and theory of how shapes and images could be fit together to fill two- and three- and multi-dimensional space To find out more about the theory and increasingly the reality of quasicrystals, read and enjoy these articles by Dr Uwe Grimm, who is thanked – along with Professor Ian Stewart – in the Acknowledgments section of The Embalmer’s Book. Uwe helped me (and subsequently the audience at our Café Scientifique in Cockermouth, to try to get to grips with the concept of the quasi-periodicity of repeating patterns in crystals: As taxidermist Ruth explains “ .. It’s so important to get the eyes and the eyelids right ... the face is everything, and it’s far too easy to get the expression wrong.”
“ ... the eyes ... look slyly, laughingly, wryly, openly, in sadness and in pain, from their painted wooden faces. In Dark Night of the Soul (1999) ... the eyes of the carved watchers reveal their despair and make us weep.” (from Ruth Kowslowski’s essay ‘Making Eyes’) Glass-makers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka are probably best-known for their series of exquisite and scientifically-detailed flowers in the Ware Collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Boston, USA. The Blaschkas also made glass eyes, as Chris Meechan, of the National Museum of Wales explains in his authoritative article on the Blaschkas’ work. “White spheres lie on cotton-wool in the compartments of a flat wooden box: blue, brown or green circles, dark centres - pot-boilers, money-spinners: artificial human eyes. On a workbench there are small bottles, pinboxes and wooden trays containing different body-parts: glass tentacles of different shapes and colours, sponge spicules, tiny shells. ‘Mix ’n match’ invertebrates amongst the powdered glass and pigments.” (from Ruth Kowslowski’s essay ‘Making Eyes’) (A digression here: you can find many photos of the Blaschkas’ beautiful glass invertebrate animals on the internet, such as sea-slugs, octopi, and sea-anemones. The sea-anemones, Actiniae, were based on the coloured engravings made by the Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in his Actinologia Britannica – and I was thrilled to find that the Blaschkas had made several glass models of the rare Stomphia churchiae that was found by Miss Anne Church, whose character I have fictionalised in my novel Seaside Pleasures. One of the Stomphia models is in the Natural History Museum and I was actually able to use it when I gave a talk there for the Darwin Live series.)
Philip Henry Gosse exclaimed about the beauty of the multi-faceted eye of the dragon-fly. Insects have ‘compound eyes’, made up of many individual units each with a lens and light-sensitive cells that form an image. The surface of some compound eyes – like those of the fruit-fly, Drosophila - looks a bit like the surface of a raspberry, each separate unit bulging slightly outwards. Yet in the mid-1990s, Walter Gehring and his colleagues performed a series of what turned out to be ground-breaking experiments in the field of developmental genetics – they showed that the gene pax6 which initiates the early stages of eye-formation in the mouse could also initiate eye-formation in Drosophila. Not a mouse eye – but a fly eye. If the mouse gene was inserted into fly cells that would normally form a leg or antenna – a fly eye grew instead! See Figures 3 and 5 of Induction of Ectopic Eyes by Targeted Expression of the eyeless Gene in Drosophila As Ruth writes in her essay ‘Making Eyes’: “We know now that Evolution is a conservationist and throws very little away: ‘You want an image-forming retina? There’s a bit of photosensitive pigment kicking around somewhere. A bit of this and a little bit of that, let’s try them in this order instead ...’ The ingredients are mixed in a different sequence, to a different recipe.”
This photo of William Hart’s fighting squirrels held in the collection at Castle Ward was in a National Trust magazine in 2002 – and was a major stimulus in making me want to write about a taxidermist. The Victorians were very fond of these anthropomorphised specimens, and artist Polly Morgan has taken this trend to new, exciting levels. In my novel, Ruth mentions Walter Potter’s ‘Kittens’ Tea-Party’ and although all of Potter’s works are now held in private collections, there are photos of several of his kitten tableaux at the Booth Museum, Brighton – where Booth’s own taxidermal preparations are on display. The 2001 Foot-and-mouth didease epidemic in Cumbria Madeleine Tregwithen, one of the main characters in The Embalmer’s Book, had her sheep flock ‘culled out’ in 2001; her neighbour Daniel’s pedigree herd of cattle was subsequently infected and killed.
The character Lisa Wallace, mathematician at the University of Liverpool, is an achondroplasic. Tom has a hard-hitting, often amusing, always provocative column Ouch! on the BBC website about disability – and he and Professor John Burn of Newcastle University made this ‘talking heads’ video about achondroplasia. ‘You should have been terminated!’ John Burn tells Tom .... Reproduced with kind permission from Newcastle University - ©1998 Copyright Newcastle University; All Rights Reserved. Taxidermist Ruth Kowslowski, one of the three main characters in The Embalmer's Book of Recipes, has now - in addition to her printed blogs in the novel - got her own online blog. Do visit it to learn more about her and to find out what she has been doing. My collaborator, Peter Normington, and I set up SciTalk in 2005 with NESTA start-up funding – because I was infuriated and despairing at the inaccurate and out-dated science and the cliché-d stereotypical scientists that I came across in fiction. SciTalk is a database of scientists who want to help fiction-writers to find out about modern science – by meeting, talking, and showing writers how and where they work. The scientists are self-selected enthusiasts, they have each set up their own webpages to tell writers what they do and why it’s exciting, the resource is free and easy-to-use ... We’re delighted that, owing to SciTalk’s success, this resource will be taken over by the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts, University of Newcastle, from January 2009. |
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