Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone - Hardcover

Black (Brian Switek), Riley

 
9780399184901: Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399184902 ISBN 13: 9780399184901
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone.” —Wall Street Journal
Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen.

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than four hundred million years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It grows and changes with you, an undeniable document of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and a potent symbol of death.

In this delightful natural and cultural history of bone, Brian Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we've left behind.

Bone is as embedded in our culture as it is in our bodies. Our species has made instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the dead like collectors' items, put our faith in skull bumps as guides to human behavior, and arranged skeletons into macabre tributes to the afterlife. Switek makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons, in all their surprising roles. Bridging the worlds of paleontology, anthropology, medicine, and forensics, Skeleton Keys illuminates the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Switek is the pen name of Riley Black, a collection of 206-some-odd bones and associated soft tissues. She is also the author of the books My Beloved Brontosaurus and Written in Stone, as well as the Scientific American blog Laelaps. Her bylines have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Wired, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, and other publications. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Introduction

CUT  TO  THE  BONE
  
When Geza Uirmeny decided to take his own life, he turned to a blade. Precisely what was tormenting the seventy‑ year‑old Eastern European shepherd is a secret kept by his remains. The tiny placard affixed beneath his toothless skull in a cabinet of wood and glass at downtown Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum doesn’t say whether it was financial stress, heartache, or any of the other painful circumstances of human life that led him to choose his own way out. But the postmortem grin formed by his jaws speaks to what happened next.
What Uirmeny didn’t know when he raised the cutting edge to his neck was that part of his throat had transformed to bone. This happens to everyone to a greater or lesser extent. The flexible carti‑ lage of your larynx—the ringed tube that gives you that distinctive part of yourself, your voice—slowly but surely starts to change as you age, rigid bone cells growing in place of the more pliant flesh.
Uirmeny’s tissues were a little more ambitious than most. As he swiped the blade across his neck, he met unexpected resistance. His larynx had been so transmuted that it formed a bony strut in his neck; in the more clinical terms of the Mütter Museum’s signage, “Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx.” That little note doesn’t record what Uirmeny felt when he realized his failure, but the scar that must have formed on his neck was a mark of a happier ending. Uirmeny, the display says, “lived until 80 without melancholy.” Bone saved Uirmeny’s life.
The lucky herdsman’s skull is one of 139 in the Hyrtl Skull Collection exhibit, the last resting place for dozens of people who perished during the second half of the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe. Each skull has its own story, recounted in a passive voice shorthand that makes the collected tales swing between the somber and the tragicomic. There’s the bony grin of Francisca Sey‑ cora, a nineteen‑year‑old Viennese prostitute who died of meningi‑ tis, next to that of Veronica Huber, a woman executed for murdering her child. They share the space with rail workers, fishermen, ban‑ dits, soldiers, and the unidentified dead, as well as a few stranger cases. There’s the cranium of Andrejew Sokoloff, a member of an extreme religious sect who died following the order’s dire require‑ ment of self‑emasculation; and the skull of Girolamo Zini, a twenty‑ year‑old tightrope walker who, the museum’s deadpan delivery tells us, “died of atlanto‑axial dislocation (broken neck).”
These crania aren’t the only bones in the Mütter’s expansive and historic collection. In addition to housing slices of Einstein’s brain and larger‑than‑life replicas of every eye injury imaginable, which sympathy pain prevented me from giving any more than a sideways glance, the Mütter Museum is home to the towering skeleton of the Mütter American Giant, the remains of a woman so tightly corseted for so long that the garments changed the very structure of her bones, and dozens of other people whose final act is to educate the rest of us about what lives inside. This is a place populated by the remarkable dead, a medical mausoleum with a nineteenth‑century aesthetic that would make a Victorian‑era anatomy student feel right at home. There’s more than a touch of the gothic about the rows of cases, not to mention a sinister feeling that you, too, might have been eyed for an exhibit had you lived during the museum’s heyday—anatomists of old would often let their ethics slip if it meant acquiring another remarkable specimen for their cabinets. These bones have taken on a second life, and that’s part of the story as much as the lives stripped down and presented among the cases and shelves. Every bone in the collection embodies a tangle of stories leading from the present back through history, and deeper still through the millions of years of evolutionary assembly that made us into our present and still‑changing form. In each skeleton, whether that person was privileged or poor, healthy or afflicted, there are stories of varied and resilient life.
Admittedly, I hadn’t paid very close attention to human bones before my visit to the Mütter that cold February morning. My affec‑ tion for bones had its origin in paleontology.
I lived just an hour from the Mütter for most of my life, and I al‑ ways promised myself I’d visit at an unspecified sometime. When I found myself with enough time and cash to visit a museum, though, I’d always opt instead to go north on NJ Transit to visit the hulking frames of dinosaurs and other prehistoric oddities in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History. Petrified bones of all shapes and sizes fascinated me, even more glorious raised and reconstructed in their life positions.
That enduring affection led me to settle in the American West, where I spend weeks out of each summer helping museum and uni‑ versity field crews dig up fragile bones that throw open windows to lost worlds. It’s difficult work. Out in the desert, science is a matter of stomping around crumbling outcrops in search of pieces of pre‑ historic lives that have miraculously survived to the present, using pick, shovel, brush, and plaster to uncover and cradle old bones before using whatever strength you can muster to drag them out of their natural tombs. All that manual labor offers plenty of time to think, of course, and the endless stream of questions that bones in‑ spire helps those wracked with fossil fever endure sunburn, gnat bites, dehydration, and cactus needles that seem to know the exact weak spot of your boots.
What was this creature? What did it look like? How did it move? What did it eat? These are puzzles that can be answered through bone. Each element has stories to tell, a record of the organism’s life wrapped up in its skeleton. To the paleontologist, bones are not grim visages of death. Skeletons are biological time capsules that tell us of lives we’ll never see in the flesh. A tooth. A string of vertebrae. An osteoderm that once acted as bony armor inside the skin. These were all living tissues that had to grow and were constantly changing within the bodies of the animals they once belonged to. Even the ti‑ niest, most boring fragment of unidentifiable Chunkasaurus gradu‑ ally turning to powder beneath the unforgiving sun is a vestige of a life come, gone, and preserved for a span of time that’s impossible to truly understand. It’s difficult to push away thoughts about life while facing death. This is as true for us as it was for Tyrannosaurus.
Gently, insistently interrogating the remains of long‑dead crea‑ tures makes every tidbit of information drawn from their skeletons a treasure. We don’t get to see them in life, so bones are most of what we have. (Tracks and traces form a supplement to the skeletons.) The entire paleontological discipline is based on resurrecting the ex‑ tinct, if only in our minds.
With our own bones, though, the connection flips. We intimately experience life and are familiar with all the squishy tissues that skel‑ etons support. With the knowledge of the living, then, the meaning of human bones is often pulled inside out. A skull is a death’s‑head, reminding us of what awaits us all. “As I am now, so will you be. As you are now, so once was I.” That’s what human skeletal remains re‑ peat to us over and over again. Just think of where we see skeletons and skulls around us. A...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399184902
ISBN 13 
9780399184901
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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