Henry Tonks and the Faceless Boys

Mar30

I have wrote in the past about how plastic surgery was originally born during the Great War as reconstructive surgery. If a soldier missing an arm or a leg was indeed a familiar figure, the introduction of new weapons during the world conflict led to the appearance of a kind of wounds precedently almost unheard of: the gueules cassées, “disfigured faces”.
Helmets were able to protect the head from granade splinters, but not the face; therefore field hospitals began to receive an unimaginable number of soldier whose faces had been blown away in large portions by the explosions.
It was an injury rarely discussed in the press, where the more iconic and patriotic image of the veteran amputee was considered more suitable, but the numbers speak for themselves: within English troops alone, 41.000 amputations were carried out, as opposed to the 60.500 men who suffered head or eye injury.
One had a higher probability of finding himself without a face rather than without legs.

Practically on every front, experimental procedures were adopted to reconstruct faces destroyed by shrapnel or burned by mustard gas.
In January 1916, at the military hospital in Aldershot, England, pioneer surgeon Harold Gillies encountered doctor Henry Tonks, who was serving as a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Henry Tonks was a doctor and an artist: besides being part of the Royal College of Surgeons, he also taught drawing and anatomy at the Slade Academy.

Soldiers were sent back from the front in desperate conditions, and Tonks had the feeling that he could not handle, from a professional and humane point of view, such a catastrophe. As he himself confessed in a letter: “I have decided that I am not any use as a doctor“. And in another letter he recounted: “the wounds are horrible, and I for one will be against wars in the future, you have no right to ask men to endure such suffering. It would not matter if the wounds did well but they are practically all septic“.
And as the war progressed, things did not improve. After the Somme offensive, on July the 1^st1916, more than 2.000 patients flooded the hospital: “men without half their faces; men burned and maimed to the condition of animal“.

Thus, when Gillies asked Tonks to document his reconstructive operations by portraying the patients’ faces before and after surgery, Tonks happily accepted, as he was certainly more at ease in the artistic dimension.
To draw portraits could seem redundant, as photographs of the disfigured soldiers were already being taken, but both doctors were convinced that the cold-hearted objectiveness of film could be misleading in respect to the tactile and expressive qualities of a painting.

Thanks to his collaboration with Gillies, Henry Tonks produced a seried of facial wound portraits which still today stands unsurpassed for its emotional impact, scientific interest and subtlety of representation.
Sure, these pastel portraits had first of all a didactic intent, and the author himself did not wish them to be seen by the general public. And yet these works show a complexity that transcends their function of medical illustrations.

To understand how Tonks worked on his subjects, we have an extraordinary fortune: in some cases, the archives still have both his pastel portraits and the medical photographs. We can therefore watch, side by side, two images of the same patient, one recorded on film and the other one composed by the charcoal and colors of the artist.

Comparing Tonks’ drawings with the photographic shots, what emerges is the abstraction operated by the artist, which is meant to remove any hint at the patient’s suffering or interiority. These are accurate works, detached and at the same time compassionate, focusing mainly on the open wound, depicted with an almost “tactile” precision through the stratification of color (a consequence of the artist’s surgical training).
And yet the uncanny quality of these drawings lies in their absolutely modern ambiguity.
What could by all means be a portrait of a normal male face — ordinary traits, well-groomed hair, a knotted tie — becomes somehow “sabotaged” by the presence of the wound. It is as if our gaze, wondering over the painting’s surface, could register all these common details, just to be short-circuited the moment it meets the scandal of the injury. An inconceivable monstrosity, which appears impossible to integrate with the rest of the image.
It is then inevitable for us to fall back to the eyes of the portrayed subject, to his gaze fixed upon us, and to wonder about its impenetrable meaning.

Another peculiarity is the use of pastel, a medium considered “feminine” in respect to more virile, lively oil color or tempera; a choice that in this case allows for the lacerations of the flesh to be rendered in a softer and more tolerable way. What’s more, thanks to the lighter tone of these colors, Tonks provides his subjects with a delicate beauty and tenderness that no photograph could have ever captured.
These portraits seem as vulnerable as the mutilated youth they represent.

Suzannah Biernoff, in her wonderful essay Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery (from which I stole most of the information for this post — you can read it in Visual Culture in Britain, n. 11, 2010) defines Henry Tonks’ works as “anti-portraits, in the sense that they stage the fragility and mutability of subjectivity rather than consolidating the self portrayed“.

Henry Tonks’ studies are set apart from classic medical illustration by virtue of this research of a particular beauty. They do not recoil from the horror they intend to portray, but cover it with a veil of elusive sensuality, in which a face becomes the sign of the uncertainty of existence, and a symbol of the cruelty Man inflicts upon himself.

My week of English wonders – II

Jun19

(Continued from the previous post)

The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History still resides in its original location, in Mare Street, Hackney, East London (some years ago I sent over a trusted correspondant and published his ironic reportage).
Many things have changed since then: in 2014, the owner launched a 1-month Kickstarter campaign which earned him £ 16,000, allowing him to turn his eclectic collection into a proper museum, complete with a small cocktail bar, an art gallery and an underground dinining room. Just a couple of tables, to be precise; but it’s hard to think of another place where guests can dine around an authentic 19th century skeleton.

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The outrageous bad taste of placing human remains inside a dinner table is a good example of the sacrilegious vein that runs through the whole disposition of objects collected by Viktor: here the very idea of the museum as a high-culture institution is deconstructed and openly mocked. Refined works of art lay beside pornographic paperbacks, rare and precious ancient artifacts are on display next to McDonald’s Happy Meal toy surprises.

But this is not a meaningless jumble — it goes back to the original idea of a Museum being the domain of the Muses, a place of inspiration, of mysterious and unexpected connections, of a real attack to the senses. And this wunderkammer could infuriate wunderkammern purists.

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When I met up with him, Viktor Wynd didn’t even need to talk about himself. Among dodo bones, giant crabs, anatomical models, skulls and unique books, unmatched from their very titles — for instance Group Sex: A How-To Guide, or If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs — the museum owner was immersed in the objectification of his boundless imagination. As he moved along the display cases in his immense collection (insured for 1 million pounds), he looked like he was wandering through the rooms of his own mind.
Artist, surrealist and intellectual dandy, his life story as fascinating as his projects, Viktor always talks about the Museum as an inevitable necessity: “I need beauty and the uncanny, the funny and the silly, the odd and the rare. Rare and beautiful things are the barrier between me and a bottomless pit of misery and despair“.

And this strange bistro of wonders, where he holds conferences, cocktail parties, masqued balls, exhibitions, dinners, is certainly a rare and beautiful thing.

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I then moved to the London Bridge area. In front of Borough Market is St. Thomas Street, where old St. Thomas church stands embedded between modern buildings. It was not the church itself I was interested in, but rather its garret.
The attic under the church’s roof hosts a little known museum with a peculiar history.

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The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret is located in the space where all pharmaceuticals were prepared and stored, to be used in the annexed St. Thomas Hospital. A first section of the museum is dedicated to medicinal plants and antique therapeutic instruments. On display are several devices no longer in use, such as tools for cupping, bleeding and trepanation, and other quite menacing contraptions. But, together with its unique location, what gives this part of the museum its almost fantastic dimension is the sharp fragrance of dried flowers, herbs and spices (typical of other ancient pharmacies).

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If the pharmacy is thought to have been active since the 18th Century, only in 1822 a part of the garret was transformed into operating theatre — one of the oldest in Europe.
Here the patients from the female ward were operated. They were mostly poor women, who agreed to go under the knife before a crowd of medicine students, but in return were treated by the best surgeons available at the time, a privilege they could not have afforded otherwise.
Operations were usually the last resort, when all other remedies had failed. Without anestetics, unaware of the importance of hygiene measures, surgeons had to rely solely on their own swiftness and precision (see for instance my post about Robert Liston). The results were predictable: despite all efforts, given the often already critical conditions of the patients, intraoperative and postoperative mortality was very high.

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The last two places awaiting me in London turned out to be the only ones where photographs were not allowed. And this is a particularly interesting detail.

The first was of course the Hunterian Museum.
Over two floors are displayed thousands of veterinary and human anatomical specimens collected by famed Scottish surgeon John Hunter (in Leicester Square you can see his sculpted bust).
Among them, the preparations acquired by John Evelyn in Padua stand out as the oldest in Europe, and illustrate the vascular and nervous systems. The other “star” of the Museum is the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the “Irish giant” who died in 1783. Byrne was so terrified of ending up in an anatomical museum that he hired some fishermen to throw his corpse offshore. This unfortunately didn’t stop John Hunter who, determined to take possession of that extraordinary body, bribed the fishermen and paid a huge amount of money to get hold of his trophy.

The specimens, some of which pathological, are extremely interesting and yet everything seemed a bit cold if compared to the charm of old Italian anatomy museums, or even to the garret I had just visited in St. Thomas Church. What I felt was missing was the atmosphere, the narrative: the human body, especially the pathological body, in my view is a true theatrical play, a tragic spectacle, but here the dramatic dimension was carefully avoided. Upon reading the museum labels, I could actually perceive a certain urgency to stress the value and expressly scientific purpose of the collection. This is probably a response to the debate on ethical implications of displaying human remains in museums, a topic which gained much attention in the past few years. The Hunterian Museum is, after all, the place where the bones of the Irish giant, unscrupulously stolen to the ocean waves, are still displayed in a big glass case and might seem “helpless” under the visitors’ gaze.

My last place of wonder, and one of London’s best-kept secrets, is the Wildgoose Memorial Library.
The work of one single person, artist Jane Wildgoose, this library is part of her private home, can be visited by appointment and reached through a series of directions which make the trip look like a tresure hunt.
And a tresure it is indeed.

Jane is a kind and gentle spirit, the incarnation of serene hospitality.
Before disappearing to make some coffee, she whispered: “take your time to skim the titles, or to leaf through a couple of pages… and to read the objects“.
The objects she was referring to are really the heart of her library, which besides the books also houses plaster casts, sculptures, Victorian mourning hair wreaths, old fans and fashion items, daguerrotypes, engravings, seashells, urns, death masks, animal skulls. Yet, compared to so many other collections of wonders I have seen over the years, this one struck me for its compositional grace, for the evident, painstaking attention accorded to the objects’ disposition. But there was something else, which eluded me at that moment.

As Jane came back into the room holding the coffee tray, I noticed her smile looked slightly tense. In her eyes I could guess a mixture of expectation and faint embarassement. I was, after all, an outsider she had intentionally let into the cosiness of her home. If the miracle of a mutual harmony was to happen, this could turn out to be one of those rare moments of actual contact between strangers; but the stakes were high. This woman was presenting me with everything she held most sacred — “a poet is a naked person“, Bob Dylan once wrote — and now it all came down to my sensibility.

We began to talk, and she told me of her life spent safeguarding objects, trying to understand them, to recognize their hidden relationships: from the time when, as a child, she collected seashells on the southern shores of England, up to her latest art installations. Little by little, I started to realize what was that specific trait in her collection which at first I could not clearly pinpoint: the empathy, the humanity.
The Wildgoose Memorial Library is not meant to explore the concept of death, but rather the concept of grief. Jane is interested in the traces of our passage, in the signs that sorrow inevitably leaves behind, in the absence, in the longing and loss. This is what lies at the core of her works, commissioned by the most prestigious institutions, in which I feel she is attempting to process unresolved, unknown bereavements. That’s why she patiently fathoms the archives searching for traces of life and sorrow; that’s why her attention for the soul of things enabled her to see, for instance, how a cold catalogue accompanying the 1786 sale of Margaret Cavendish’s goods after her death could actually be the Duchess’s most intimate portrait, a key to unearthing her passions and her friendships.

This living room, I realized, is where Jane tries to mend heartaches — not just her own, but also those of her fellow human beings, and even those of the deceased.

And suddenly the Hunterian Museum came to my mind.
There, as in this living room, human remains were present.
There, as in this living room, the objects on display spoke about suffering and death.
There, as in this living room, pictures were not allowed, for the sake of respect and discretion.

Yet the two collections could not be more distant from each other, placed at opposite extremes of the spectrum.
On one hand, the aseptic showcases, the modern setting from which all emotion is removed, where the Obscene Body (in order to be explained, and accepted by the public) must be filtered through a detached, scientific gaze. The same Museum which, ironically, has to deal with the lack of ethics of its founders, who lived in a time when collecting anatomical specimens posed very little moral dilemmas.
On the other, this oasis of meditation, a personal vision of human beings and their impermanence enclosed in the warm, dark wood of Jane Wildgoose’s old library; a place where compassion is not only tangible, it gets under your skin; a place which can only exist because of its creator’s ethical concerns. And, ultimately, a research facility addressing death as an essential experience we should not be afraid of: it’s no accident the library is dedicated to Persephone because, as Jane pointed out, there’s “no winter without summer“.

Perhaps we need both opposites, as we would with two different medicines. To study the body without forgetting about the soul, and viceversa.
On the express train back to the airport, I stared at a clear sky between the passing trees. Not a single cloud in sight. No rain without sun, I told myself. And so much for the preconceptions I held at the beginning of my journey.

The premature babies of Coney Island

Dec1

Once upon a time on the circus or carnival midway, among the smell of hot dogs and the barkers’ cries, spectators could witness some amazing side attractions, from fire-eaters to bearded ladies, from electric dancers to the most exotic monstrosities (see f.i. some previous posts here and here).
Beyond our fascination for a time of naive wonder, there is another less-known reason for which we should be grateful to old traveling fairs: among the readers who are looking at this page right now, almost one out of ten is alive thanks to the sideshows.

This is the strange story of how amusement parks, and a visionary doctor’s stubbornness, contributed to save millions of human lives.

Until the end of XIX Century, premature babies had little or no chance of survival. Hospitals did not have neonatal units to provide efficient solutions to the problem, so the preemies were given back to their parents to be taken home — practically, to die. In all evidence, God had decided that those babies were not destined to survive.
In 1878 a famous Parisian obstetrician, Dr. Étienne Stéphane Tarnier, visited an exhibition called Jardin d’Acclimatation which featured, among other displays, a new method for hatching poultry in a controlled, hydraulic heated environment, invented by a Paris Zoo keeper; immediately the doctor thought he could test that same system on premature babies and commissioned a similar box, which allowed control of the temperature of the newborn’s environment.
After the first positive experimentations at the Maternity Hospital in Paris, the incubator was soon equipped with a bell that rang whenever the temperature went too high.
The doctor’s assistant, Pierre Budin, further developed the Tarnier incubator, on one hand studying how to isolate and protect the frail newborn babies from infectious disease, and on the other the correct quantities and methods of alimentation.

Despite the encouraging results, the medical community still failed to recognize the usefulness of incubators. This skepticism mainly stemmed from a widespread mentality: as mentioned before, the common attitude towards premature babies was quite fatalist, and the death of weaker infants was considered inevitable since the most ancient times.

Thus Budin decided to send his collaborator, Dr. Martin Couney, to the 1896 World Exhibition in Berlin. Couney, our story’s true hero, was an uncommon character: besides his knowledge as an obstetrician, he had a strong charisma and true showmanship; these virtues would prove fundamental for the success of his mission, as we shall see.
Couney, with the intent of creating a bit of a fuss in order to better spread the news, had the idea of exhibiting live premature babies inside his incubators. He had the nerve to ask Empress Augusta Victoria herself for permission to use some infants from the Charity Hospital in Berlin. He was granted the favor, as the newborn babies were destined to a certain death anyway.
But none of the infants lodged inside the incubators died, and Couney’s exhibition, called Kinderbrutanstalt (“child hatchery”) immediately became the talk of the town.

This success was repeated the following year in London, at Earl’s Court Exhibition (scoring 3600 visitors each day), and in 1898 at the Trans-Mississippi Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1900 he came back to Paris for the World Exhibition, and in 1901 he attended the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY.

L'edificio costruito per gli incubatori a Buffalo.

The incubators building in Buffalo.

The incubators at the Buffalo Exhibition.

But in the States Couney met an even stronger resistence to accept this innovation, let alone implementing it in hospitals.
It must be stressed that although he was exhibiting a medical device, inside the various fairs his incubator stand was invariably (and much to his disappointment) confined to the entertainment section rather than the scientific section.
Maybe this was the reason why in 1903 Couney took a courageous decision.

If Americans thought incubators were just some sort of sideshow stunt, well then, he would give them the entertainment they wanted. But they would have to pay for it.

Couney definitively moved to New York, and opened a new attraction at Coney Island amusement park. For the next 40 years, every summer, the doctor exhibited premature babies in his incubators, for a quarter dollar. Spectators flowed in to contemplate those extremely underweight babies, looking so vulnerable and delicate as they slept in their temperate glass boxes. “Oh my, look how tiny!“, you could hear the crowd uttering, as people rolled along the railing separating them from the aisle where the incubators were lined up.

In order to accentuate the minuscule size of his preemies, Couney began resorting to some tricks: if the baby wasn’t small enough, he would add more blankets around his little body, to make him look tinier. Madame Louise Recht, a nurse who had been by Couney’s side since the very first exhibitions in Paris, from time to time would slip her ring over the babies’ hands, to demonstrate how thin their wrists were: but in reality the ring was oversized even for the nurse’s fingers.

Madame Louise Recht con uno dei neonati.

Madame Louise Recht with a newborn baby.

Preemie wearing on his wrist the nurse’s sparkler.

Couney’s enterprise, which soon grew into two separate incubation centers (one in Luna Park and the other in Dreamland), could seem quite cynical today. But it actually was not.
All the babies hosted in his attractions had been turned down by city hospitals, and given back to the parents who had no hope of saving them; the “Doctor Incubator” promised families that he would treat the babies without any expense on their part, as long as he could exhibit the preemies in public. The 25 cents people paid to see the newborn babies completely covered the high incubation and feeding expenses, even granting a modest profit to Couney and his collaborators. This way, parents had a chance to see their baby survive without paying a cent, and Couney could keep on raising awareness about the importance and effectiveness of his method.
Couney did not make any race distinction either, exhibiting colored babies along with white babies — an attitude that was quite rare at the beginning of the century in America. Among the “guests” displayed in his incubators, was at one point Couney’s own premature daughter, Hildegarde, who later became a nurse and worked with her father on the attraction.

Nurses with babies at Flushing World Fair, NY. At the center is Couney’s daughter, Hildegarde.

Besides his two establishments in Coney Island (one of which was destroyed during the 1911 terrible Dreamland fire), Couney continued touring the US with his incubators, from Chicago to St. Louis, to San Francisco.
In forty years, he treated around 8000 babies, and saved at least 6500; but his endless persistence in popularizing the incubator had much lager effects. His efforts, on the long run, contributed to the opening of the first neonatal intensive care units, which are now common in hospitals all around the world.

After a peak in popularity during the first decades of the XX Century, at the end of the 30s the success of Couney’s incubators began to decrease. It had become an old and trite attraction.
When the first premature infant station opened at Cornell’s New York Hospital in 1943, Couney told his nephew: “my work is done“. After 40 years of what he had always considered propaganda for a good cause, he definitively shut down his Coney Island enterprise.

Martin Arthur Couney (1870–1950).

The majority of information in this post comes from the most accurate study on the subject, by Dr. William A. Silverman (Incubator-Baby Side Shows, Pediatrics, 1979).

(Thanks, Claudia!)

Astral Colonel NOF4’s telepathic voyages

Sep22

“To write is to travel without the hassle of the luggage“, Salgari wrote. For Mauriac, “a writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness“. Both these concepts, the mental voyage and the struggle with solitude, are good ways to understand the life and work of NOF4, whose original name was Oreste Ferdinando Nannetti.

We don’t get to choose life. We keep telling ourselves we are in control, but sometimes the boat’s wheel is broken from the beginning. The life that was destined to Oreste Ferdinando Nannetti was a painful one: born in Rome in 1927, on New Year’s Eve, son of Concetta Nannetti and of unknown father, he soon grew to be clearly different from other kids. At the time, this meant there was only one destination for him on the horizon – the insane asylum. Oreste entered a mental hospital for the first time at age 10, after having been committed to a charity institution three years before. In 1948 he was charged with insulting a public official, but the judge acquitted him on the grounds of deminished responsibility (“total mind defect“); he then spent some 10 years at the Santa Maria della Pietà psychiatric hospital, before being definitively transferred to Volterra. Oreste arrived to the asylum in Volterra in the worst possible moment, when the hospital was still ruled by a prison regime, with barred and locked windows and the order to address the male nurses as “guards”. Things slowly began to improve after 1963, but the police atmosphere continued, although with increasingly lighter tones, until the hospital was abandoned in 1979 after the Basaglia Law. In 1973 Nannetti was dismissed, and transferred to the Bianchi Institute. He died in Volterra in 1994, and to look at his life, now, it all seems to be spent under the sign of civil negation, beginning with that ignominious initials on his birth certificate, “NN”, “Non Noto” (“unknown”), where his father’s name was supposed to be. The life of a poor son of a bitch that ought to be removed, erased, forgot. Just another failed mutation.

But Oreste Ferdinando Nannetti, in spite of everyone, absolutely left a trace of his passage on this reality, in fact he cut it, sliced it, incised it. And he wrote, to travel with his mind and fight his way through loneliness.

During his years of internment in Volterra, Nannetti engraved his feverish masterpiece: a colossal, immense “graffiti book” on the wall of the Ferri section. 180 meters long (590ft) and 2 meters high (6ft), the graffiti was accomplished by using the buckle from his waistcoat (all the patients wore one) to carve the plaster. Later, Nannetti began “writing” in this same way on the concrete banister of a big staircase, adding another 106 meters (347ft) by 20 centimeters (8in) to his work. His production also consists of more than 1.600 writings and drawings on papers, including several postcards: these postcards, which he never sent and which were adressed to imaginary relatives, are another attempt to win his battle over an unthinkable solitude.

If his said and miserable biography, which you just read summarized in a single paragraph, was Nannetti’s “official” life, as one could see it from the outside, through his writings and graffiti his real story comes out, his true reality.
In this dimension, Oreste was not just Oreste, but rather an “astronautical mining engineer in the mental system“, “saint of the photo-electric cell“, and called himself Nanof, Nof, or mainly NOF4. This acronym meant indiscriminately “Nannetti Oreste Fernando”, “French Oriental Nuclear”, or even “French Oriental Nations”, while 4 was the identification number he received at the beginning of his internment. How many multitudes live inside a man who defines himself as “Nations”?
NOF4’s “mining” work consisted in studying and digging through reality, and his graffiti really was his “mining key” to access the unfathomable depths of the psyche. In it we read that “glass, metal sheets, metals, wood, the bones of the human being and of animals and the eye and the spirit are all controlled through the reflective magnetic cathode beam; all images who possess a body heat are living matter, and they can even die twice“.

NOF4 can telepathically communicate with aliens: “Nannetti’s texts are about imaginary nations taking over other imaginary nations, about spaceflights, about telepathic connections, about fantastic characters, poetically described as tall, spinach-like and with a Y-shaped nose, about hypertechnological weapons, about mysterious alchemic combinations, about magical virtues of metals, ecc.“. (Quaderni d’altri tempi, II,6)

As a paranoid agent under cover in Burroughs‘ Interzone, Nannetti received dispatches from beyond and reported his psychic investigation’s results on the concrete wall: “I have gathered some news by telepathic means, which will seem weird to you but are true: 1. The Earth is still, and stars turn on Earth’s side; 2. The woman has got no father, your father was a woman“. Heroic, borderline scientist inside his “nuclear observatory“, NOF4 measured magnetic fluxes, saw forests made of metal pylons and antennas with his mind’s eye, and kept carving his graffiti with his buckle.
“The dense lines of text of which [the graffiti] is composed, with drawings and illustrations sometimes interrupting it, give the idea of a constant flow of words, sounds, images. An encyclopedia of the world almost treated as inner dialogue, and delivered to the world itself with urgence, maybe chaotically, but surely with a strong determination“, writes sociologist Adolfo Fattori, and his words are echoed by Lara Fremder: “Maybe this is how it went, it happened that a man with no history tried to write one for himself, and in order to do that he chose a wall, a big wall, a 180 meters surface, the whole facade of the psychiatric hospital. And he began to write and draw and to collect everything inside carved pages on the wall. […] What I think, what I love to think, is that NOF4 had other interlocutors to have a conversation with, and he showed them his drawings, and handed them the keys to his own mining system. I love to imagine these interlocutors really understood that lunatic well, studying with him projects and plans for other dimensions, surely not for this one, where day after day we witness a slow agony of meaning and beauty“.

The psychiatric hospital in Volterra, closed in 1979, is in a state of complete abandon. Of Nannetti’s graffiti, which is considered a world masterpiece of outsider art, little was saved (a piece was detached in 2013 for preservation). Only some parts of it still stand, and we have just a few photocopies of his writings and drawings. If not for Aldo Trafeli, a male nurse who was the only one to talk to Nannetti, eventually becoming his friend, we probably wouldn’t even know his story.

Among the still existing parts of the graffiti, one in particular is the visible trace of Nannetti’s kindness. In some points, the lines of text go up and down: when asked about this strange “wave”, Oreste replied that he did it because he didn’t want to disturb the other patients, who sat against the wall warming in the sun; he could have asked them to move, but he preferred to continue his carvings around their heads.

Nannetti, the “nuclear safecracker”, the “astral colonel”, never went past elementary school. But, even without being a person of letters, in writing he found a spaceship to explore his own illness and pain.
NOF4 was not alone anymore, NOF4 could travel: “as a free butterfly singing, the whole world is mine… and everything makes me dream…“

The only existing moving images of NOF4.

Here’s the italian Wiki page about NOF4. The quotes in the post come from a marvellous monographic number of Quaderni d’altri tempi entirely dedicated to Nannetti.
(Thanks, gery!)

Il pietrificatore di pazzi

Dec8

Abbiamo già parlato dei più famosi pietrificatori in questo articolo. Ritorniamo sull’argomento per esaminare la figura del torinese Giuseppe Paravicini (1871-1927), e la peculiare storia dei suoi preparati.

Paravicini ricoprì la carica di anatomista presso l’Istituto di Anatomia Patologica del più grande manicomio d’Italia, a Mombello di Limbiate, dal 1901 al 1917, e dal 1910 al 1917 fu appuntato direttore del suddetto nosocomio. Avendo accesso diretto ai cadaveri dei pazienti deceduti da poco all’interno dell’istituto, Paravicini sperimentò su di essi alcune tecniche conservative, costituendo una notevole collezione di preparati.

Fra i reperti perfettamente conservati, si contavano (nelle parole del Paravicini stesso), “una bella serie di encefali di idioti, epilettici, paralitici, dementi precoci, dementi senili, alcoolisti […] intestini con ulcere tifose e tubercolari […] polmoni […] con vaste caverne, fegati affetti da cirrosi atrofica, ipertrofica, da sarcomi e noduli cancerigni, una milza sarcomatosa di eccezionali dimensioni, reni con neoplasmi, cisti, ecc.“; i cervelli, in particolare, erano tutti suddivisi lombrosianamente secondo la malattia mentale che li aveva afflitti. Vi erano anche uno scheletro deforme affetto da nanismo e delle preparazioni in liquido di teste e feti.

Ma i pezzi più straordinari erano i busti interi, che ancora mostravano perfette espressioni del volto. Fra di essi, anche il busto di un acromegalico e quello di alcune donne.

E, infine, i due corpi interi pietrificati dal Paravicini: quello di Angela Bonette, morta il 3 giugno del 1914 e affetta da demenza senile, e Evelina Gobbo, un’epilettica morta di polmonite il 16 novembre 1917.

Giuseppe Paravicini pare fosse gelosissimo del suo metodo segreto, e come altri pietrificatori ne portò le formule nella tomba.
Quello che si può dedurre dai documenti e dalle testimonianze oculari è che per la conservazione dei corpi interi egli utilizzasse una pompa a pressione costante per iniettare, mediante un’incisione sull’inguine del defunto, soluzioni a caldo di cera, solventi e paraffina (secondo altri, olii balsamici e qualche tipo di fissante). Il liquido entrava dall’arteria femorale, attraversava tutti gli organi, il derma e lo strato sottocutaneo per poi uscire dalla vena.
Per quanto riguarda le parti anatomiche più piccole, invece, egli si affidava all’uso di formolo, alcol e glicerina. Si trattava di metodi complessi e non certo rapidi, molto simili per alcuni versi a quelli utilizzati dal suo ben più celebre predecessore Paolo Gorini.

Il risultato era, se possibile, ancora più incredibile delle pietrificazioni del Gorini. Scrive infatti Alberto Carli: “le opere di Paravicini appaiono al tatto più morbide e umide di quelle goriniane, che dimostrano, invece, un eccezionale stato di secchezza lignea.” Le sue preparazioni mantenevano un aspetto talmente realistico che, immancabile, si diffuse la leggenda che egli eseguisse le sue mummificazioni mentre il soggetto era ancora in vita, essendo in grado di sperimentare in corpore vili (cioè su corpi di persone di scarsa importanza). Certo è che la sua collezione, proprio per il fatto d’esser stata realizzata sui cadaveri di degenti del manicomio, aveva un elemento disturbante ed eticamente imbarazzante che spinse i responsabili a tenerla sempre nascosta negli scantinati dell’istituto.

I reperti vennero in seguito trasferiti all’Ospedale Psichiatrico Paolo Pini, il cui direttore prof. Antonio Allegranza fece installare delle teche a protezione dei corpi interi, e dei supporti in legno per i busti. Sempre Allegranza sostiene di aver visto la pompa con cui presumibilmente Paravicini iniettava la sua formula, prima che andasse persa nel trasloco da Mombello al Paolo Pini.
Dal Paolo Pini, la collezione venne spostata brevemente al Brefiotrofio di Milano, poi nella Facoltà di Scienza Veterinaria.
In tutti questi decenni, gli straordinari preparati rimasero dietro porte chiuse, visibili soltanto agli studiosi.
Infine, l’Università di Milano li affidò in deposito gratuito alla Collezione Anatomica Paolo Gorini per poterli degnamente esporre. Oggi sono finalmente visibili all’interno dell’Ospedale Vecchio di Lodi, nelle sale adiacenti alla collezione Gorini.

I volti di questi anonimi pazienti del manicomio di Mombello rimangono, al di là dell’interesse anatomico, una drammatica testimonianza di un’epoca: ombre di vite spezzate, spese in condizioni impensabili oggi.
L’ex-manicomio di Mombello è tutt’ora un’enorme struttura abbandonata: i lunghissimi corridoi ricoperti di murales, le scalinate fatiscenti, i cortili divorati dalla vegetazione, i padiglioni dove arrugginiscono i letti e le sedie d’epoca sono ormai esplorati soltanto da fotografi in cerca di location suggestive.

NOTA: le foto a colori presenti nell’articolo ci sono state gentilmente offerte dal nostro lettore Eros, che ha visitato la collezione quando era ancora in stato di abbandono nei sotterranei di una palazzina della Provincia di Milano; le foto in bianco e nero (precedenti di almeno una decina d’anni) sono opera di Attilio Mina. Le foto del manicomio sono invece di Emma Cacciatori.

(Grazie, Eros!)

Il volto del dolore

Apr26

All’inizio del secolo scorso la medicina stava entrando nella sua età più matura e progredita; eppure, come abbiamo spesso notato (vedi ad esempio i metodi per aprire una bocca descritti in questo articolo), la pratica terapeutica mancava ancora della doverosa attenzione per il paziente e per la sua sofferenza.

Nei primi anni ’30 il Dr. Hans Killian, uno dei più conosciuti anestesiologi e chirurghi tedeschi, sentì che era tempo di cambiare l’attitudine dei medici nei confronti del dolore. Secondo il Dr. Killian, non soltanto ne avrebbero beneficiato i pazienti in quanto esseri umani, con una propria dignità e sensibilità, ma perfino la pratica medica: riconoscere i sintomi della sofferenza, infatti, avrebbe dovuto essere parte integrante dell’anamnesi clinica. Come esporre la questione in maniera scientifica e al tempo stesso incisiva?

Il Dr. Killian era appassionato di arte e fotografia, ma fino ad allora aveva tenuto ben separati i suoi interessi estetici dalla professione medica. Il suo primo libro di fotografie, intitolato Farfalla, mostrava suggestive immagini delle farfalle che lui stesso allevava, e venne pubblicato sotto pseudonimo, per non mettere a repentaglio la “serietà” del suo status di chirurgo. Questa volta, però, la posta in gioco era troppo alta per non rischiare. Così il Dr. Killian decise di pubblicare a suo nome (anche a discapito della sua carriera) il progetto che più gli stava a cuore, e che avrebbe contribuito a cambiare il rapporto medico-paziente.

Il suo controverso libro, pubblicato nel 1934, si intitolava Facies Dolorosa: Das schmerzensreiche Antlitz (“l’aspetto del dolore”). Si trattava di 64 fotografie di bambini, uomini e donne di ogni età, ricoverati all’ospedale dell’Università di Freiburg in cui egli stesso esercitava come chirurgo. I soggetti dei ritratti erano suoi pazienti, alcuni dei quali terminali, fotografati nei loro letti.

Sfogliando il volume, si avvertiva subito un’evidente (e feconda) ambiguità. Da una parte, la raccolta poteva essere interpretata come testo prettamente medico, un’osservazione empirica relativa al primo stadio di ogni diagnosi, cioè l’esame esterno del paziente: in questo senso, il libro aveva lo scopo di illustrare e catalogare tutti i diversi modi in cui la malattia può manifestarsi sul volto, influenzandone l’espressione. Veniva per esempio mostrata la facies tragica dei malati di ipertiroidismo, in cui la retrazione spastica della palpebra superiore causa una peculiare mimica con “occhi sbarrati”, assieme a diversi altri tipi di “maschera” che indicano specifici disturbi.

Ma la forza del suo libro, il Dr. Killian ne era ben conscio, non stava nella cornice scientifica – che era anzi poco più che un alibi. Molte delle sue fotografie, infatti, non mostravano affatto i segni evidenti della malattia, bensì si focalizzavano sull’ansia, la tristezza e lo sconforto infinito veicolato dagli sguardi dei pazienti. Con la sua Rolleiflex, Killian si prefissava di catturare gli effetti della malattia sull’umore di quelle persone, il loro stato psicologico, la loro essenza umana sotto la fatica e la debilitazione.

Al di là dei dati statistici e misurabili, Killian era alla ricerca di ciò che definiva das Unwägbare, “l’imponderabile”: a suo dire, infatti, ogni diagnosi si affidava anche a una sorta di istinto suggerito dall’esperienza, una fulminea “impressione” che il medico aveva guardando il paziente durante la prima visita. Certo, le analisi in laboratorio avevano il loro peso, ma per Killian l’arte medica viveva innanzitutto di questo genere di intuito.

L’opera del Dr. Killian è tutta racchiusa in questa duplicità, in questa tensione fra la solidità apparente della presentazione scientifica e la dimensione emotiva della sofferenza. Paradossalmente le fotografie di Facies Dolorosa, nonostante non mostrino morbi o deformità particolarmente scioccanti, colpiscono in maniera ancora più profonda l’osservatore: in luogo dell’asetticità che ci si aspetterebbe da un atlante medico, propongono una visione partecipe dello sconforto e del dolore dei soggetti rappresentati. Talvolta i malati guardano in macchina, talvolta il loro sguardo sembra perdersi oltre l’obbiettivo, in una commovente contemplazione della propria condizione. I pochi e spogli dettagli, oltre al volto, concentrano tutta l’attenzione sul corpo, divenuto una gabbia penosa e desolata.
Che l’empatia fosse ciò che davvero interessava a Killian risulta evidente nei due casi in cui l’intimità dell’obbiettivo si spinge fino a fotografare il soggetto prima e dopo la morte.

Il libro ebbe probabilmente un ruolo fondamentale nell’evoluzione del rapporto medico-paziente; oltre a questo, Facies Dolorosa scavalcò coraggiosamente i confini tra scienza ed arte in un periodo in cui queste due discipline erano largamente considerate contrapposte. La sua aura di poetica umanità colpisce anche oggi, tanto che l’esperto di storia della fotografia Martin Parr lo ha definito “forse il più melanconico di tutti i libri fotografici”.

You Are My Sunshine

Jun11

Questo signore oggi si sta lentamente riprendendo, ma al momento in cui è stato girato il video aveva il bacino rotto e un’infezione al sangue che comprometteva la salute del suo cuore. Pensava di essere sul punto di morire. Nella triste e risaputa cornice di un letto d’ospedale, lui e sua moglie, ancora uniti contro il freddo del mondo, ci regalano una perla di rara e delicata magia.

Phineas Gage

Apr30

Phineas Gage era un semplice operaio americano, capocantiere addetto alla costruzione di ferrovie. Era un uomo umile, affettuoso, amichevole e gentile, certo, ma poteva aspettarsi tutto… tranne che per una tragica sfortuna la sua vita cambiasse la storia.

Il 13 settembre 1848, nei pressi di Cavendish nel Vermont, Phineas stava inserendo una carica esplosiva all’interno di una roccia che andava fatta saltare per poter far passare i binari che i suoi uomini stavano costruendo. Con la sicurezza dettata dall’abitudine, Phineas stava pressando della polvere da sparo nella fenditura della roccia con un ferro di pigiatura, quando improvvisamente la polvere esplose. Il lungo palo che egli aveva in mano fu sparato verso l’altro, conficcandosi nella guancia proprio sotto all’occhio sinistro, e uscendo dalla parte superiore del cranio. Il ferro aveva trapassato i lobi frontali del suo cervello, andando poi ad atterrare 25 metri più in là.

Eppure, miracolosamente, dopo pochi minuti Phineas era già cosciente e in grado di parlare. Affrontò senza problemi il viaggio di 4 miglia fino allo studio di un dottore. Il medico, nonostante l’evidente, tremenda emorragia, non poteva credere al racconto di Gage, che insisteva nel dire che un ferro gli avesse trapassato la testa: chi poteva essere tanto fortunato da raccontare una storia simile, vivo e vegeto, e perfettamente razionale? Il medico pensò che forse era successo qualcosa di meno grave, finché Gage non si alzò per vomitare. Lo sforzo fece emergere dal foro sul cranio un pugno di materia cerebrale che cadde sul pavimento. A quel punto, era chiaro che non si trattava di un paziente sotto shock che blaterava a vanvera: una parte del cervello di Phineas era davvero stata maciullata dal trauma.

La convalescenza di Gage fu difficoltosa, passata per molto tempo in stato semi-comatoso, con risposte a monosillabi solo se interpellato direttamente. Eppure, il 7 ottobre Phineas si alzò dal letto, e meno di un mese dopo camminava già tranquillo nella piazza del paese, saliva e scendeva le scale, e si riprendeva a vista d’occhio, senza dolori o sintomi fisici preoccupanti. Ma non tutto era come prima. Il suo carattere era cambiato, si era fatto oscuro e imprevedibile.

A causa dell’incidente, Gage divenne talmente irascibile, e privo di qualsiasi freno inibitore, che nemmeno gli amici intimi potevano più riconoscerlo. Non sopportava il minimo diniego o consiglio, si lasciava andare a bestemmie e volgarità che contrastavano con il suo precedente contegno, faceva mille progetti che abbandonava minuti dopo: venne descritto come un bambino con gli istinti animaleschi di un adulto. La sua antisocialità lo portò a perdere il lavoro, e molte delle sue amicizie.

Nonostante il suo cambiamento di personalità sia stato nel corso del tempo grandemente esagerato, in molti degli scritti e degli studi a lui dedicati, Phineas Gage rimane comunque un esempio unico nel campo della neurologia, della psicologia e delle materie correlate. Gli studi sulle condizioni di Gage hanno apportato grandi cambiamenti nella comprensione clinica e scientifica delle funzioni cerebrali e della loro localizzazione nel cervello, soprattutto per quanto riguarda le emozioni e la personalità, e le diverse competenze dei due emisferi cerebrali. È anche in seguito alle riflessioni teoriche avviate in conseguenza di questo caso che, per alcuni decenni della metà del XX secolo, sono stati usati metodi, oggi in totale disuso, come la lobotomia prefrontale (già affrontata su Bizzarro Bazar, in questo articolo) per curare certi tipi di disturbi del comportamento. Il caso Gage è ancora oggi citato e studiato ampiamente nella saggistica neurologica.

Il teschio di Gage e il bastone di ferro che ha causato il suo trauma cranico sono esposti al pubblico nel museo della Harvard Medical School. Una vita sfortunata, a cui dobbiamo la grande fortuna di conoscere meglio la struttura e le funzionalità dell’organo a tutt’oggi più misterioso, il nostro cervello.