The Bone of the Matter

“… it behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untrussing the points of his nose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.”

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The basement of the Paleontology Department of the Natural History Museum is dim, dry and lonely. The underground complex of the Museum, so I was told, once served as a bunker for telephone operations during WWII. Its construction is war-proof, the walls are made of solid concrete and measure 3 feet in thickness, the staircases leading to it are zig-zagged in order to prevent bombs from plunging straight inside (lesson learnt from the London tube bombings during the Blitz). This is where the human remains are kept. When I first visited this basement I remember jokingly saying that “well, if the Germans ever attack again, we know at least the dead are safe”.

I’m claustrophobic. I had managed to live in London for over 10 months without once stepping inside its underbelly (I was ‘forced’ to face my fear by a friend who insisted that Wimbledon was worth riding the tube for.. it was), but working as a volunteer at the NHM was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life, and I’d gladly plunge into the stale eeriness of its basement again (did I mention the lights automatically turn off every 20 minutes?).

Virtually every department and basement of the NHM is open to visitors (albeit through a complicated system of pre-bookings and identity checks, I’m sure). The human remains collection, however, is strictly restricted “due to the nature of the collection”. And I got the chance to work there. For about 2 months I was supervised by the curator of the Paleontology Department, Dr Rob Kruszynski, and was responsible for measuring the baby bones of a 9th Century Norse population.

Because of the nature of the little project I was responsible for, I needed reference material, such as osteology books and papers on human bone development and growth, which Rob duly supplied. Sometimes, however, it’s difficult to side bones (especially very young ones) without a more tangible visual aid, therefore it was agreed that a mounted baby skeleton would be placed in the room next door for me to use as a reference in case of doubt. It turns out that it wasn’t so much placed in the room next door, as it was hidden from everyone else’s view in the room next door between a box with bones and a box with a mummy, all because “it may offend some people’s sensibility”.

My first thought: “?”

There I was, in a dim, dry, lonely basement, with over 10,000 adult human skeletons, all carefully stored and preserved, but the baby skeletons have to be hidden away from ‘people’s sensibility’? We have to beg for people to react in the face of human (adult human) tragedy, and even find excuses to justify it at times, but we go kicking and screaming onto the streets for human fetuses? .. and now we have to hide the fetal osteological evidence too?

Tibetans (among other peoples) dispose of their dead by feeding their corpses to the vultures (in what is called a sky burial). In ancient Egypt, bones and soft tissue are both preserved for the after life in a complex, ritualistic process that remains perplexing to this day. When Dr Charles Lockwood (one of my professors last year) was killed in an accident, he was cremated. It seems we are either completely removed from our bones, or deeply attached to them. The same goes on in the scientific world; we obsessively hunt for bones and compulsively clean, preserve, study and measure them, but while in some continents, the excavation of a 19th century cemetery isn’t given second thoughts, in others, the resurfacing of a 9,000 year old ‘relative’ is cause for a lawsuit.

Our relationship towards death is full of contradictions, and our relationship towards the dead is too. In many cultures, present and past, the dead are treated and disposed of differently according to their status and age bracket. This is especially true of children, who in many instances do not find a place near the adults in cemeteries until they have been baptized – a rite of passage that marks one’s birth into the world of the living. Perhaps there is a certain element of eeriness about handling the unborn younglings after all?… It seems that our relationship with these calcium hydroxyapatite structures is merely a reflection of our own feelings towards death and the dead – what I might find endlessly comforting, others might find intolerably disturbing. But in the end, are we really our bones?

Whether we care or not about what we do with them after death is a matter of personal or cultural choice, but in life, whether we are newborns or grown-ups, our bones are our shells and our frames. They are tucked beneath pounds of (I imagine) unsavory flesh, we never see them in life, but are what’s left when we die. They are the source of our life, the marrow of it. Bones are incredibly malleable and can adapt to all the loads we inflict upon them in life, yet they are sturdy, and keep us standing in the face of life’s impacts. They give us our posture, our height, they tell stories about our pains, our preferences in menu, our beliefs, if we were loved or hated – or both.

Yes, indeed, we are very much our bones.