October 20, 2004
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Liver and Soul
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2846 hit(s)
I recently finished a book named Stiff, which has the subtitle "The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." It's a kind of natural history of previously-owned bodies, as they turn up in, say, medical schools, automotive testing labs, mortuaries, dinner, and some other places.
It's interesting enough, but a not-necessarily-predictable aspect of the book is that it's also quite funny in places. The author, Mary Roach, is just your basic funny person. There are lots of examples, but I thought I'd pick her writing on the millenia-old debate of where in the body the soul lives.The seat-of-the-soul debate has been ongoing for some four thousand years. It started out not as a heart-versus-brain debate, but as a heart-versus-liver. The ancient Egyptians were the original heart guys. They believed that the ka resided in the heart. Ka was the essence of a person: spirit, intelligence, feelings and passions, humor, grudges, annoying television theme songs, all the things the make a person a person and not a nematode. The heart was the only organ left inside a mummified corpse, for a man needed his ka in the afterlife. The brain he clearly did not need: cadaver brains were scrambled and pulled out in gobs ...
The Babylonians were the original liver guys, believing the organ to be the source of human emotion and spirit. The Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotions to the liver and intellect to the heart. These guys clearly marched to the beat of a freethinking drummer, for they assigned a further portion of the soul (cunning) to the stomach.
With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. At this point she interjects with the following footnote:We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Cèline Dion singing "My Liver Belongs to You" and movie houses playing The Liver is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazón, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting hígado, and bumper stickers would proclaim, "I [liver symbol] my Pekingese." She's clearly on a roll. A page later, she continues:Living amid our culture's heart-centric rhetoric, the valentines[1] and pop song lyrics, it is hard to imagine assigning spiritual or emotional sovereignty to the liver. Part of the reason for its exalted status among the early anatomists was that they erroneously believed it to be the origin of all the body's blood vessels. I think it was something else, too. The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It's glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian. It looks like sculpture, not guts. Stomachs are flappy, indistinct; intestines, chaotic and soupy. Kidneys skulk under bundles of fat. But the liver gleams. It looks engineered and carefully wrought. Its flanks have a subtle curve, like the horizon seen from space. If I were an ancient Babylonian, I guess I might think God splashed down here too.
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