chapters from the Book of Kings. In a stippled engraving from a 1724 self-portrait, Buchinger used micrographic lettering to form his florid wig: the text spells out seven complete psalms and the Lord’s Prayer!
Jay tells us that viewers “respond to Buchinger’s micrography as they do to the performance of magic: when they are stunned, or stumped, they seek an explanation.” Biologists will not be surprised that Robert Hooke’s name pops up here; Buchinger lived in the golden age of the microscope. Hooke’s novel images of cellules in Micrographia (1675) and Antonj van Leeuwenhoek’s pictures of “animalcules” in semen (1677) may well have prepared Buchinger’s patrons for a new world of magic in magnification.
JAY WAS DRAWN TO BUCHINGER not only for the little man’s skill at micrographics but also by the story of a fellow conjurer who performed sleight-of-hand without hands: “magical tricks, performances on a variety of musical instruments, trick shots with pistols and swords, and bowling.” From his childhood in Bavaria, where he was called a “thimble,” Buchinger became increasingly famous over Western Europe as a skilled performer. He was a whiz at card play, swordplay, and even at dancing the hornpipe in a Scottish kilt. He entertained audiences at street fairs and manor houses, public inns and royal seats; he appeared in venues ranging from Leipzig to Dublin, the Tuileries in Paris to the Court of Saint James’s in London. A 1726 broadside described him as “The Greatest German Living”—this in the reign of the Hanoverian George I.
Equally surprising was Buchinger’s private life. Jay has quipped that this dwarf without arms and feet had at least one operating appendage: he managed to wed four wives and claim fatherhood of fourteen children. Buchinger’s somewhat Freudian drawing of his family tree is neatly reproduced in Jay’s book. Dated 1734, the two-page cutout depicts the artist’s children—eight living, six dead; born in Zurich, London, or Dublin—as fruit hanging from the branches of a tall, thick paternal trunk. The tree is solidly planted on rootless lumps of soil atop the steles of four women, three dead and one living. Tiny flowers sprinkle the field, micrographic gametes in a pictorial autobiography. That “Greatest German” broadside described it thus:
Great Trunk of Man be not ashamed
That Nature has thy Body maim’d
The Oak could not the Trophy bear
Till that the branches cropped were,
Nor would thy fame hae been so great,
Had Nature formed thee quite compleat.
As for that “Greatest German” claim of fourteen seminal trophies, his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach (1785–1850) had Buchinger beat. Formed “quite compleat” and conventionally digited, Bach fathered twenty children with two wives and had time left over for the Mass in B Minor. But Buchinger over his lifetime entertained audiences far more diverse in rank and geography than did the composer—and with neater penmanship to boot.
Readers figuring out how this “Body maim’d” became a paterfamilias will also wonder how Buchinger mastered miniscule calligraphy without the aid of optical gadgets. Ricky Jay was also puzzled by this and posed the question to several eminent artists. Their verdict came out on the side of lenses: Art Spiegelman, Erich Fischl, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha guessed that Buchinger used magnifying lenses, possibly fixed to a ring-stand apparatus not uncommon at the time. Jay, writing “as a magician” concludes that Buchinger probably did ordinary lettering in public—a stunt in itself without digits—but worked out micrography in private, with magnifying lenses.
“Sure he did,” Jay concludes skeptically, while remaining a fan of a fellow magician and author whose fame far exceeded his phocomelic bodily form.
RICKY JAY PAYS MORE THAN PASSING ATTENTION to that bodily form, another reason why biologists will want to read the book. Evolution dictates that in phylogeny, fins come before limbs: in phocomelia, limb ontogeny stops cold. Jay quotes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authorities who supposed that phocomelia results from “maternal imprinting,” then defined as “a traumatic stimulus encountered by any pregnant woman.” Local officials even banned Buchinger from performing at fairgrounds, worried that women frightened by his appearance might bear children similarly malformed. It turns out that the idea of maternal imprinting isn’t all that far-fetched. Zika, rubella, and other viruses linger in the tissues of the fetus and cause permanent, if not fatal, deformities. But I’d bet it wasn’t Zika but a teratogen that did Buchinger in.
Epigenetic effects of thalidomide and vitamin A on our inner fish serve as a model of what happened to the little man from Nuremberg. Sainte-Hilaire’s phocomelia was an anomaly for over a century after its description, but in 1957 along came thalidomide. Soon after the drug was approved in Europe to treat morning sickness in pregnancy, reports began to appear in medical journals of babies born with flipper-like limbs; the tabloids went wild. The drug was finally banned for pregnant women worldwide in 1961, thanks mainly to the courageous Frances Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration, who had blocked its approval in the United States. Unfortunately, by then more than ten thousand children, mostly in Germany and Britain, had been born with drug-induced defects of their extremities; those who reached adulthood look very much like twenty-first-century Buchingers (an image of the German filmmaker Niko von Glasow is on Wikipedia). Work on the molecular pharmacology of thalidomide by Neil Vargesson has implicated a metabolite of the drug as a possible culprit and permitted discovery of the way its partner in tissues, the protein cereblon, acts to blunt limb development.
Both before and after thalidomide, another culprit has been implicated in phocomelia—at least in the lab. Following the work of Honor B. Fell and her students at the Stangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, studies of how high doses of vitamin A affect embryonic limb development have moved to the molecular level, as I described in an early paper. Excess vitamin A affects “maternal imprinting,” but not by frightening expectant mothers. Recent studies, such as Sheikh et al., show that high doses of vitamin A produce changes in stem cell differentiation, acting in part by epigenetic modifications of pathways that dictate how fins become limbs in the course of evolution.
How would hypervitaminosis A account for limbless Buchinger? Prompted by the happily digressive tone of Ricky Jay’s book, I’ll make a bold suggestion. I doubt that Buchinger’s mother munched on too many carrots; I’d put my money on an overdose of Gruenkohl—green kale, cabbage, or kraut. Kale, a staple of the Bavarian diet, has the highest vitamin A content of any food available in Buchinger’s time. Could a Bavarian mother have been imprinted by an overdose of kraut? That notion seems as improbable as four wives and fourteen children fathered by a “little man from Nuremberg.” A trendy German website, facetiously named Krautkanal, celebrates Buchinger’s “improbable” exhibit in New York, linking kraut virally to the dwarf. There is, of course, another improbable link between viruses and sauerkraut, which requires lactic-acid bacteria for its fermentation. Bacterial strains that have survived phage infection are the fittest for the job: to no one’s surprise, CRISPR keeps the sauerkraut sour.
Ike on Orlando: “Every Gun Is a Theft”
Every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought
