The mutilated packed-up body of modern anatomy in 19th-century Iran

“Finally, an idea came to me. I would cut up her body, pack it in a suitcase, my old suitcase, take it away with me to some place far, very far from people’s eyes, and bury it there.”

In his debut novella The Blind Owl written in 1936, the Iranian writer and intellectual Sadiq Hidayat (1903-1951), had his protagonist mutilate the dead body of a woman. The man, only a few pages into the novella, is musing over the different ways he could dispose of the body of his beloved woman lying motionless in his apartment. In the midst of his confused thoughts over the many options that he could consider, the corpse opens its/her eyes and displays for the man a fleeting look—so he believes. Having been astonished and thrilled by those lively dead eyes, the man quickly draws the expression on a piece of paper before her eyes sink back into the corpse. He carefully folds the piece of paper and place it in a tin box, so that he can look at it again if he wishes. In this way, he “had fixed on paper the spirit which had inhabited those eyes and [he] had no further need of the body, that body which was doomed to disappear, to become the prey of the worms and rats of the grave”. Only then, he begins to cut the body into pieces and subsequently pack them in an old suitcase.

When Hidayat published The Blind Owl, the modern medical practices of dissection and surgery had already been established as fundamental techniques in the Iranian medical landscape. Mutilation of the human body, either cutting it open or into pieces, have of course been widely practiced, medically or otherwise, across the globe throughout most part of its human history. But cutting it and placing it in a suitcase come across as particularly tailored for modern sensibilities. This modern spectacle of a mutilated and packed-up body was not only the product of a rampant imagination, but also rooted in a historical reality. How can there be a mutilated body, neatly packed up in a suitcase, without there being a certain practical necessity as well as a theoretical justification for cutting the body? As a matter of fact, it was when surgical and dissective techniques acquired an unquestionable status during the institutional modernisation of medical praxis in Iran that a mutilated and packed-up body was literarily conceivable. In the first modern institute of higher education in Iran, called Dar al-Funun or The Chamber of Techniques (1851), an independent discipline emerged, one that shaped much of the cultural imagination of the body in the decades to come.

We know this discipline today as modern anatomy, the science of the human body taken apart limb by limb and analysed separately (see image). It was within this discipline that for the first time the human body began to be conceived of as a “factory”: a system of organs that work together as part of a mechanism. But before this metaphor became prevalent in the cultural imagination of Iranian society, the body had been far from working as a factory. What came to be known as anatomy in the modern sense was designated by the Arabic word tashrih in the 19th-century, in the sense of cutting into pieces for the sake of analysis. However, the word meant something different in premodern times. It simply meant describing.

Anatomy had therefore been a science of describing the body, and not analysing it. In this sense, the proto-anatomy (anatomy before the emergence of the science proper) of premodern Islam understood the body as an integral part of the world. Traditional physicians, poets and theologians of the sixteenth century, for example, often thought of it as part of both the terrestrial and the celestial world. For them, the body was as much part of the earth as it was of the sky, as much of the soil as of the stars, and as much connected to the material world as to the divine. But when it began to be understood as a factory, a certain tension ensued that ruptured the cosmological integrity of the body. If the body was a mechanism, could it be disassembled? Could it be imagined limb by limb instead of a seamless organic whole? The body-as-a-factory changed the ways in which the human body experienced, and was experienced, by the world.

Hidayat’s imagination brought together this double-edged transformation when he had his protagonist mutilate the woman’s body and pack it in a suitcase. This horrifying disassembled body was therefore a new way of knowing the human body. That “old suitcase” framed the body as an object of knowledge, as it were. But it could only do so if the body was already dismembered, and it could be dismembered only if it was imagined to be composed of members (organs) to begin with. In contrast, a body imagined as an organic and divine part of the cosmos could not, and should not, have been mutilated. The idea of a body as a mechanism that could fit into a frame (or a suitcase) was simply at odds with the premodern conception of humanity in the Islamic milieu.

Arash Ghajarjazi, PhD candidate at Utrecht University, department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, specialised in Iranian Studies.