The Sea Inside

College of Surgeons and his skeleton later put on display there, while his hide was publicly auctioned and his meat sold, along with recipes for ‘elephant stew’. Letters of protest to
The Times
prompted the establishment of the Zoological Society of London that year, as a more enlightened way of keeping animals. ‘To place an elephant, or any beast, without a mate and in a box bearing no greater proportion to his bulk than a coffin does to a corpse, is inhuman,’ wrote one outraged correspondent, deeply offended by the ‘cruel spectacle’.
    But then, this part of the city was not confined only to animal displays. In his autobiographical
The Prelude
, Wordsworth described the uproarious human zoo of Bartholomew Fair, where, on the land next to the hospital, ‘the silver-collared Negro’ joined ‘… Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,/The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig’ in a ‘Parliament of Monsters’. It was a world out of Blake’s progress too, where walls were daubed with apocalyptic graffiti: ‘Joanna Southcott’, ‘Murder Jews’ and ‘Christ is God’. Set against such scenes, Chunee’s death seemed of a piece, conjuring up ancient Rome as much as the imperial city which had replaced it.

    In the sedate corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the shelved exhibits are stripped bare of flesh, all of a colour, the same pallor you see in your skin when you flex your knuckles. In one jar is the head of a chimpanzee, its eyes half-open like a doll’s; in another, a rat drowned in formaldehyde. And in others are human foetuses at every stage of development, floating in tobacco-coloured fluid and pressed-glass wombs.
    At the far end of the room is a series of portraits, a decided counterpoint to the worthy surgeons in the hall. They depict piebald children, pathologically obese men, exotic Siamese twins. The saving grace is that they are dignified with names and faces beyond the mere fact of their freakishness, among them Daniel Lambert, whose ballooning body weighed fifty-two stone at his death, and Charles Byrne, whose seven-foot-seven-inch skeleton was acquired by Hunter (at a vast cost of five hundred pounds), despite its owner’s desire to be buried at sea. ‘The whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irish Giant,’ one newspaper noted, ‘and surrounded his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale.’ Rendered down in Hunter’s Earl’s Court boiler, Byrne’s remains now tower over those of another unfortunate whose crumbling bones desperately tried to regenerate themselves as their owner’s contorted spine, ribcage and pelvis grew ever more baroque, sprouting curlicues and coralline osseous splays.
    Hunter’s three-dimensional index of disease reminds us that pathology is the study of pain itself, from the Greek
pathos
, meaning feeling or suffering. But touring this queasy cabinet of medical curiosities, I’m most taken by the jars which contain the stomach linings of whales, so convoluted that it amazes me my own innards should be so formed, resembling as they do a cavern dense with stalagmites, or the living extrusions of a reef, although later, on another hospital visit, I would watch on a digital screen as a miniature camera snaked up my intestine, revealing its reassuringly pink and worm-like tract, while the consultant and I compared the length of human intestines – as long as a tennis court, he told me – to those of a whale’s, which could unroll for a quarter of a mile.
    Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves. Hunter’s assembly of cetacean guts suggests that these creatures and their physiology were equally mysterious to the surgeon – and all the more fascinating for that. ‘The animals which inhabit the sea are much less known to us than those found upon the land,’ he wrote, ‘and the œconomy of those with which we are best acquainted is much less understood; we are therefore too often obliged to reason from analogy where information fails, which must probably
ever continue to be the case
, from our unfitness to pursue our researches in unfathomable waters.’ He was the first scientist to describe the cetacea – both inside and out – with any degree of accuracy, and he did so in his paper ‘Observations on the structure and œconomy of whales’, presented to the Royal Society on 28 June 1787 by Joseph Banks and which, when published in the
Philosophical