Think of this as a companion website for those studying the human body and asking questions that that study does not necessarily broach.
Socrates famously opined that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, Apology (38a5-6)). In this, I include the scientific examination of ourselves as living organisms.
I began studying the human body from a scientific perspective in the mid-1970s. My enthusiasm for the subject has never waned. I have spent much of my life teaching anatomy, physiology and physical anthropology at university level in Britain. In so doing, I have faced one constant problem. I used to refer to this in my lectures as ‘The Humpty Dumpty problem’.
As everybody knows from the nursery rhyme:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
When studying the human body, we encounter the same difficulty confronted by ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’. And it is a difficulty of our own making.
The approach we take when teaching anatomy and physiology is a reductionist one. Here, a complex, integrated whole becomes fragmented into sets of smaller, more manageable components. These may, in turn, become fragmented even further. Thus, we find ourselves studying bits rather than wholes. Furthermore, these ‘bits’ are typically studied in isolation from the whole.
This approach is legitimate; it makes a lot of practical sense. Moreover, it is an approach that has proved to be highly successful when addressing many of the medical problems we face. Indeed, it is the approach widely adopted by much of modern science.
Reductionism does not necessarily produce a pile of random fragments like the pile into which Humpty was reduced - but it often seems that way. However, the outcome of reductionism is not a synthetic understanding of the object in question: ourselves. The emphasis is on analysis rather than synthesis. The reductionist approach to the human body, while it is methodical, does not lead us to be able to put it back together again - at least, not conceptually - even though we may have come to learn a great deal in the process. Relevant textbooks on the subject exhibit a form of deconstruction. There is never a reconstruction attempted towards the end. Textbooks leave the reader in a kind of limbo. Accordingly, teaching based upon such textbooks alone must lack a sense of culmination or ’rounding-off’.
I am basing this blog on notes written over several years. It represents an attempt to address some of the conceptual problems I have encountered while thinking scientifically about the human body. I am also interested in how anatomy and physiology are best taught and understood.
Having amassed a considerable body of loose and somewhat disorganised notes, I have concluded that the best way of sharing them is to offer them as a Miscellany of short, written pieces. In sharing these thoughts, I hope readers find them interesting and thought-provoking. In revisiting these notes, I also hope that I might be able to develop my ideas further.
I am not trying to find a way of putting Humpty together again; I am leaving him for dead and moving on to consider the new questions that arise. How all this works out in practice remains to be seen; that is part of the enterprise.
