The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures

The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures is an anatomical work whose displayed image becomes more than an object of medical study for Stella: it is a confrontation with the exposure of an unnamed pregnant woman and a disturbing mirror of Stella’s own history. In the Hunterian Museum, the image arrests her; later, as she recalls it alongside the journey of a projectile, its opened body and tiny apparent passage through the womb acquire the force of a question about injury, survival, and miracle.

The Display and Its Image

The book dominates a central window in the Hunterian Museum’s entrance hall, where square stainless-steel display cases contain exhibits. Its image is almost life-size: a full-term pregnant woman has been opened to reveal the child crowded inside her womb. Stella’s first response is bodily hesitation. She cannot decide whether to look away, lower her eyes, or react with horror or embarrassment, and sees her own pale raincoat reflected in the glass as she stands rooted before it.

The image’s opened flesh is arranged in four triangular flaps, which Stella recognizes as having been cut in the shape of a cross. She imagines the woman’s body stripped not only of clothing but of flesh and dignity, and recoils especially from the depiction of the legs as butchered cuts. The womb itself appears entirely full, like a Russian doll containing another body, with no room to spare. Yet Stella notices a tiny corridor between the baby’s right knee and the index finger. The gap might be a passage, or it might be a miracle; the image makes anatomical space and the possibility of survival difficult to separate.

A label identifies the image as a drawing from William Hunter’s 1774 work. The word gravid strikes Stella as cumbersome, while the plain phrase she associates with her mother, full to the brim, seems to make the condition more immediate. The displayed book thus sets a formal medical name beside Stella’s more intimate language for pregnancy, without resolving the distance between the two ways of describing a body.

The Unnamed Subject and the Medical Gaze

Stella understands the drawing as the record of a dissection and imagines that the woman and her child must have been dead. The artist, collector, and anatomist receive mention, but the woman does not: she has no name, and her unborn child had no time to acquire one. Stella distinguishes her from a criminal or executed person and imagines her as ordinary, someone who died on the brink of joy. The work’s claim to knowledge therefore has a human cost in Stella’s reading: the body is made legible for study, while the person whose body it was disappears from the record.

That absence shapes Stella’s response more powerfully than the drawing’s technical accuracy. She mourns the woman and child, and says a prayer for each of them. The image is at once an anatomical object and a presentation of suffering in which the visible details are abundant but the subject’s identity and experience are withheld. Stella’s attention restores, through grief and prayer, a measure of recognition that the display itself does not provide.

Stella’s Encounter with Michael Gilmore

Stella first finds the museum while sheltering from rain with Michael Gilmore, who has not yet started school. After the lift opens onto the museum, Michael runs ahead; when he returns, Stella places herself between him and the drawing and guides him away toward the dinosaurs and stuffed animals. She anticipates the questions he might ask and cannot bear to present herself to her son through the image of a wounded, exposed pregnant body.

The encounter changes the relation between observer and exhibit. Stella has come to look at the drawing, but while standing before it she feels that she has become the figure it shows: splayed and wounded. Her decision to shield Michael is therefore not simply a response to an upsetting exhibit. It also protects him from seeing an image through which Stella recognizes her own vulnerability, although she does not tell him what connects them.

Return of the Image and Stella’s History

The museum image returns in Stella’s later, sleepless recollection as she tries to sort miracle from possibility and trace the projectile’s journey. Its tiny gap between finger and knee echoes the bullet’s passage through her own body. The remembered drawing does not establish what happened anatomically in either case; instead, it gives Stella a visual form for the unresolved alternative she carries between an improbable escape and a miracle.

Stella eventually tells Kathleen that, while very pregnant in Belfast in the early 1970s, she was shot in the stomach. Lying on the pavement, she prayed that her unborn child would live and vowed to devote the rest of her life to God if it did. She had never disclosed the pledge, not even to her husband. She says the bullet appeared to pass through her, entering one side and leaving the other; the doctors told her that the only damage was that she would be unable to have more children. Michael Gilmore is her only child. Set beside this confession, the anatomical work’s image of a nameless pregnant woman makes Stella’s private history newly legible without making it public: the book becomes a point of recognition between a displayed body denied a name and a survivor whose own experience had remained unspoken.