Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (18 page)

The New York designer Milton Glaser was the first to put the
in a sentence: I
NY. This long-lived slogan – it dates from 1976 – has succeeded far beyond its creator’s anticipations. It sends an unmistakable warm embrace, disarming the city visitor who might otherwise tremble before the urban chaos. I
NY is ingenious above all because it has a truth at its core to do with our love of place and how that in turn creates community. There is a more calculating cleverness about it, too. The logo is easily copied. There are knock-offs of the I
NY symbol everywhere in the city, and this is not accidental. Whereas great effort goes into ensuring that a corporation’s logo is only reproduced by the right people in the right way, Glaser’s logo has no copyright protection. The idea was that anybody and everybody in New York could use it. It was an unpredictable strategy, but more than thirty years on, it has yielded huge dividends. True, it is not replicated with precision on every occasion. The heart shape may not swell in quite the way of the original; the typeface will more than likely not be the one (American Typewriter) that Glaser chose. But, in its way, the design is doing its job all the better because of this, showing as well as everything else that New Yorkers are nobody’s conformists. And there is undreamed-of multicultural diffusion far beyond the five boroughs. Clumsy homage is paid by other states: ‘Virginia
is for lovers’, for example, or ‘I L
V
ERMONT’
, both official bumper stickers. J’
Quebec, Me
Antigua and I
Allah are found further afield. All these variants subliminally recall New York too, effortlessly augmenting the message of many cultures rubbing along together that is such an intrinsic fact of New York life, even as they announce their own passions.

The kidney is quite as shapely as the heart. Any self-respecting St Valentine’s Day confection must be heart-shaped lest its amatory purpose be overlooked. But today we also find kidney-shaped cakes being made to celebrate successful transplant operations. In the manner of party cakes, these are often gruesomely realistic, sometimes with the ureter and major blood vessels sculpted in colour-coded icing as if copied from an anatomy textbook. The implications of this new custom seem not to have been worked through. The giving of heart-shaped gifts is clearly meant to represent the giving of one’s own heart. A kidney-shaped bakery item starts off well enough as a kind of ‘rebirthday’ cake. In eating it, the recipient perhaps re-enacts the incorporation of the donated organ. But the symbolic consumption of the donated kidney by any other celebrant seems a touch macabre.

Most organs have, like the heart, a shape that is characteristic, but still sufficiently irregular as to elude easy description. In other words, one heart is shaped pretty much like the next, but not enough like any familiar object that it may be used as a visual index. The kidney goes a step further, having a shape that is so characteristic of itself only that it has given its name to a miscellany of other natural and manmade objects, from kidney beans to the garden swimming pools advertised as ‘kidney-shaped’, presumably designed that way to look more natural than the obvious rectangle.

The leaves of plants, too, are sometimes kidney-shaped, or reniform to use the technical term. There is a single explanation for the occurrence of this unusual shape in so many natural organisms (if not in swimming pools). We have seen how the stylized heart may have developed (and perhaps the diamond, club and spade, too) from diagrammatic representations of different leaves. D’Arcy Thompson, in his masterly work
On Growth and Form
, shows how all these shapes originate from small alterations in the radial and tangential vectors of leaf growth (that is to say, the rate at which growth thrusts upward from the stem and the rate at which it spreads aside). A high thrust and a low spread results in a lanceolate leaf, or ‘diamond’, whereas a heart shape arises when the spreading force is greater relative to the thrusting force so that part of the leaf fans out wider around the stemming point. Further restriction on the nominal upward growth leads to the squashed but otherwise symmetrical kidney shape seen in the leaves of plants such as pennywort, many beans and our own kidneys.

Various hard-to-describe shapes come to the fore in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel
Bend Sinister
. Recurrent visual motifs – puddles oblong and ‘spatulate’, the water-filled outline of a footprint, an ink stain in the shape of a lake – seem to hint at something of vital importance that has been forgotten by the recently bereaved central character, Adam Krug, who is engaged in a struggle against the totalitarian regime run by his former schoolmate. The tale also abounds in images of human organs – an inflated football has ‘its red liver tightly tucked in’; there is ‘a black colon’ of ink on somebody’s collar; a person’s rump is like ‘an inverted heart’. The shapes and colours, and the memories which they seem to represent, enable the reader to share a little of the synaesthetic condition to which Nabokov was subject. These symbolic strands eventually converge when Krug’s tormentor spills a glass of milk, forming a kidney-shaped puddle, providing an unnecessary reminder that Krug’s wife died following an operation on her kidney.

There are many mysteries that remain to be uncovered concerning the curious forms into which the body and its organs grow. Not the least of these is the matter of why we possess two kidneys. Nature’s general rule is to give us just as much of everything as we need, no more and no less. Two horizontally set eyes give us binocular vision by which we are able to judge distance. The spacing of our two ears likewise helps us to determine where a sound is coming from. The UK National Kidney Federation, however, says it’s not known why we have two kidneys. It may be a knock-on effect of the general anatomical doubling that produces two legs very early in the development of the embryo. This would also explain why we unnecessarily possess two testes or two ovaries. Or it may be the legacy of some necessity far back in our evolutionary past. Most animals have two kidneys like us, but some have more, and even the human embryo actually develops three pairs of kidneys about a month after conception, with only the last of the three becoming functional organs.