Carol Ann Rinzler - Leonardos Foot: How 10 Toes, 52 Bones, and 66 Muscles Shaped the Human World

LEONARDOS FOOT

HOW 10 TOES, 52 BONES, AND 66 MUSCLES

SHAPED THE HUMAN WORLD

HOW 10 TOES, 52 BONES, AND 66 MUSCLES

SHAPED THE HUMAN WORLD

CAROL ANN RINZLER

BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS

New York

First published in the United States in 2013 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

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Copyright 2013 by Carol Ann Rinzler

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rinzler, Carol Ann.

Leonardos foot : how 10 toes, 52 bones, and 66 muscles shaped the human world / Carol Ann Rinzler. 1st ed.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-934137-63-5

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Anthropology, PhysicalhistoryPopular Works. 2. Biological Evolution--Popular Works. 3. FootPopular Works. 4. History of MedicinePopular Works. GN 50.4]

QP34.5

612dc23

2013004519

Book design and type formatting by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks (c. 15081518)

For

Perry Luntz

MARCH 9, 1927APRIL 13, 2009

and

Patricia Marie Dolan

MAY 6, 1939NOVEMBER 15, 2011

.

LEONARDOS FOOT

HOW 10 TOES, 52 BONES, AND 66 MUSCLES

SHAPED THE HUMAN WORLD

B OOKS HAPPEN.

You read something or a friend says something or youre walking down the street and you see something and you say to yourself, thats interesting. Then everywhere you look you see something about the something, and sooner or later the something turns into an idea and the idea turns into a proposal and then, if youre lucky, into a book.

One August morning in 2011, as I was lacing up my sneakers, I looked down at my underwhelming, underreported, and completely indispensable human feet, and thought, Thats interesting.

When I told my agent, Phyllis Westberg, that I had decided to write about feet, her response was not what you would call encouraging. Phyllis and I have lived through more than twenty books together, so I take seriously her view of authoring which is that if you cant put it on paper, it isnt real. And when she says paper, thats what she meanscomputer screens dont count. So I started to put it on paper, and four months later, I had two chapters and Phyllis said, Who knew feet could be this interesting.

Actually, I did.

And so, it turned out, did the authors of the Old and New Testaments, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and virtually every single twentieth century anthropologist who wandered through Africa, Asia, and Europe in search of the first primate to stand up on two legs.

The only body part completely exclusive to human beings is the chin (more about that later on). Everything elseeyes, ears, nose, heart, lungs, liver, arms, and legscan be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. That includes our hand with its famous opposable thumb. Apes, giant pandas, raccoons, and opossums also have an opposable thumb; koalas have not one, but two opposable thumbs on their front paws (the back paws have only one).

Koala hand with two thumbs (left) vs. foot with one thumb (right).

But like the chin, the homely foot with its adducted big toe, firm arch, and plantigrade sole, different in design from every other foot and hoof on earth, is unique and much to our advantage, powering our movement and, throughout history, enabling our cultural, political, and scientific development.

This was not always a popular idea. As my editor Leslie Hodgkins observes, our insistence on the evolutionary primacy of the brain said (and says) much about how we humans see ourselves. Our brain seems to us the thing that separates us from the herd on Noahs Ark while our body ties us to the rest of the worlds inhabitants, and our foot, lowest of the low, binds us to the earth, the ground cursed with thorns and thistles because Eve ate that apple. Yes, we speculate that this or that animal has an almost-human brain. But we dont believe it for a minute, just as we dont believe that intelligence is so random that ifas the classic anecdote proposeswe put a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters and leave them there long enough one of them will eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

I write about food and health and medicine, which means I usually work surrounded by stacks of medical books, journals, and papers held in place by my trusty Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine, one of the worlds most erudite paperweights.

This time there were also history books to tell me how a clubfoot was one birth defect not considered justification for infanticide. There were art books with pictures of paintings and sculpture to show our fascination with a perfectly arched foot. There were nutrition texts to explain the relationship between protein, purines, and gout, the worlds worst pain in the toe. There was psychiatry (and carefully selected pornography) to illustrate the sexual power of the fragrant foot.

There were biographical dictionaries to track a cast of characters ranging from Greek philosophers to Arab physicians, British poets, and American statesmen, all of whom had more than a word to say about our lower extremity. Where they are availablenot all of them areI have tacked a birth and death date onto the name of every important historical player in this story (living persons are entitled to their privacy) because knowing when they lived adds context to their actions. On occasion, I have included middle names. Charles Robert Darwin just sounds so much more friendly and accessible than plain Charles Darwin. And you are free to make what you will of the fact that the great French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne dropped what looks like a middle name, but is actually his fathers family name, preferring to be known instead as Michel de Montaigne, Michael of the Chateau Montaigne, the place where he was born and the property he inherited in the town now known as Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne.

There were also two Bibles replete with references to the foot, most of them euphemisms for other body parts; Bartletts Familiar Quotations as back-up; and the infinite Internet that grants access to everything from the staid old/new