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Aust. N . Z . J . Surg. 1992,62,60-69

SURGICAL HISTORY

FREDERIC WOOD JONES, ARTIST AND ILLUSTRATOR*

B . E. CHRISTOPHERS

Wood Jones’ sojourn in Australia

Frederic Wood Jones came to Australia from Eng- land in 1920 to take up the Elder Chair of Anatomy at the Adelaide University which he held until 1926. Thereafter he went to Honolulu where he filled the Rockefeller Chair of Anthropology in the University of Hawaii. In January 1930, Wood Jones returned to Australia, this time to the Chair of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne. At the end of 1937 he returned to England leaving behind him a reputation which still endures.

His abilities were recognized by the conferment of the honorary degrees of DSc at both Melbourne and Adelaide universities and by numerous invita- tions to deliver important memorial lectures and orations. As further evidence of the esteem in which he was held, a full length oil painting of him hangs in the entrance hall of the Australasian Col- lege of Surgeons in Melbourne. He delivered the George Adlington Syme Oration at the opening of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons on 14 March 1935 and he received one of the College’s first honorary fellowships. He had an affinity with students which was unparalleled in the medical schools of Australia and he had a special regard for the surgeons of antiquity. His talents as biologist, anatomist, anthropologist, teacher, writer and orator have been lauded by many but little mention has been made of his talents as an artist.

Paintings of lizards, geckoes and snakes

A series of fortuitous events led to the author pur- chasing 19 drawings of lizards, geckoes and snakes drawn by Wood Jones with pencil, pen and brush.’ These watercolours (Figs 1, 2) were painted in I899 when he was a second year medical student at the London Hospital Medical School probably as part of his zoology course.

The serendipidous find of these paintings prompted a re-estimation of innumerable diagrams,

*Based on a lecture given to the staff at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on 6 November 1990.

Richmond. Victoria 3121, Ausrralia. Correspondence: Dr B E. Christophers, 377 Church Street,

figures and drawings which illustrate his books and journal articles. Many of these diagrams are more than just effective illustrations, they have an aes- thetic value in their own right. The commentary upon these drawings will wherever possible be based upon Wood Jones’ own text. The captions of the illustrations used in this paper are as they occur in his publications.

Drawings of lips

When Wood Jones left Melbourne in 1937 he gave a collection of his anatomical drawings to James Guest.’ Three of these drawings are reproduced here (Figs 3, 4, 5). It is interesting to speculate when and for what purpose they were drawn. There is extant a Memorandum of Agreement, dated 13 March 1909, between Dr F. Wood Jones of the Priory, Roehampton and Edward Arnold, publisher.3 In this memorandum, reference is made to the proposed publication of a manuscript by Wood Jones entitled ‘Anatomy from the point of view of function’. The manuscript is described as having ‘about 140,000 words with index and about 200 illustrations from black and white drawings sup- plied free of charge by the Author. [It was to have been] published at about fifteen shillings net in the autumn of 1910’. The manuscript itself is not to be found in the Wood Jones’ collection at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and it was never published. It is possible that these drawings are from that manuscript, in which case they were drawn in the period 1904-09.

LIPS IN LNFANCY

Wood Jones wrote of ‘the lips in infancy’ as follows:4

The lips of the new-born baby show one very well marked characteristic. In the adult the grading from the mucous membrane lining the buccal aspect of the lips to the specialized skin covering their ex- posed surface is effected by a gradual transition over an intermediate zone. In the infant the passage from the internal to the external zone is made with some abruptness along a line that runs conspicuously along the red margins of the lips parallel to their free borders. The external zone, which runs round the periphery of the lips is the pars glabra or smooth

FREDERIC WOOD JONES 61

Fig. 1. Grass Snake.

area of the embryonic lip, while the internal zone of LIPS I N WHISTLING the immediately adjacent edges of the lips is the

villi, is termed the pars villosa. The pars villosa is the of the lip that is employed in grasping the nipple and its differential characters persist during the whole period of suckling although the sharp line of contrast between it and the Pars &bra S I O W ~ Y disappears during infancy and is formally lost by merging into the transition zone after the child is a year old.

which, since it is beset with The illustration depicting the disposition of the lips when whistling (Fig. 5 ) shows the sphincter action of the lips created by the contracted fibres of Or- bicularis oris which are attached to skin. These drawings are exquisite examples of pointilism. Another instance of this method of drawing, that of a nose (Fig. 6 ) , is to be found in an unpublished manuscript by Wood Jones entitled ‘Human anatomy for students of physical anthropology.’5

Fig. 3. The lips of an adult. Fig. 4. The lips in infancy.

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. . _. . .. . . ;, *.:

..”.’ _... . . . ... .. . ...

.I.

... ....

Fig. 5. The lips contracted for whistling to show the sphincter action of the orbicularis oris.

Spinous processes

Spinous processes were the subject of two figures in his book Arboreal Man which was published in 1916.6 At that time he was Professor of Anatomy in the London School of Medicine for Women. This book was his first major work on comparative anatomy and was based on lectures given to students at St Thomas’s, Manchester and the London School of Medicine for Women. He expressed the following on the disposition of spinous processes.

The most conspicuous differences between mammals is the direction in which the spinous processes slope. The more primitive disposition seen in many reptiles shows the vertebra attached to the pelvic girdle possesses on upright spinous processes [Fig. 71.

All the vertebrae in front of this have their spines directed slightly backwards. The upright spine of the pelvic vertebra of the reptiles entitles this vertebra to be identified as the anticlinal vertebra. The pelvic anticlinal vertebra is a true centre of movement in such animals. The head, neck and the whole of the trunk may be pulled towards the fixed pelvic girdle. The elongated tail may be pulled up towards the same fixed point. The range of body movements possible with this arrangement of spinous processes and associated muscles are crawling, waddling, shuffling, ambling and aquatic paddling.

The second type of spinous process disposition (Fig. 8) is seen in the dog which has the spines of the upper trunk and neck vertebrae retroverted. The third last of the dorsal vertebrae is at the anticlinal point, also termed the centre of movement. In watching a greyhound loping along, the anticlinal

Fig. 6. The nose

Fig. 7. Diagram of the vertebral column of an animal in which all the spinous processes are retroverted.

point can be visualized. An animal with such an anticlinal vertebra has the facility to bend its back as a leaf-spring is bent, the apex of the bend being at the anticlinal point. These things are clear enough when we look at the skeleton of a dog or a hare and weave into the bones the picture of the animal laying itself out, and doubling itself up, as it goes at full speed.

The giraffe advances both limbs of the same side at the same time during quiet progression. In this animal all the cervical, dorsal and lumbar spinous processes slope backwards; there is no centre of movement forward of the hips. It is not surprising that the lumbering elephant, with its peculiarly

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inner side of the foot for the purpose of scratching the skin and dressing the fur, to which offices they are exclusively designed’. No better statement could be made concerning their structure and function, nevertheless Owen’s clear pronouncement - like so many of his dicta - has often been overlooked. We cannot pretend to approach any more nearly to accu- racy by adopting Pocock’s more recent suggestions that in the koala they are sufficiently well developed to assist in climbing, and in the wombat are large enough to be subservient to digging. It is enough to know that they are used in the toilet and not in climbing or digging; that they are large enough to be used in either of these latter processes is a piece of information of no importance. That our hands are used for a variety of refinements of function is interesting, that they are large enough and strong enough to support the body weight in quadrupedal progression is no sound argument that their use lies this way.

T H E M U L G A R A ( K R E F F T ’ S POUCHED M O U S E )

It was the marsupials as much as the sunshine which lured Wood Jones to Australian shores. One of his favourite marsupials was the Mulgara. He writes admiringly of this sturdy little animal as f01lows:~

The Mulgara is an absolutely fearless animal, and beyond doubt it is one of the most intelligent of the marsupials. Those that I have had in captivity have shown the most trusting boldness: they will come confidently to the hand, and although for their size one of the most efficient carnivorous forms, they make no attempt to bite unless molested. . . . for in all things it is a remarkably dainty and clean little animal. . . . They will not kill a sickly fellow, nor will they devour its body when dead; but they vacate the nest in which a dying comrade is lying, and do not molest it in any way’.

These qualities of behaviour are captured by Wood Jones in his drawing of Krefft’s Pouched Mouse (Fig. 12).

THE K O A L A

Of the koala Wood Jones wrote with feelings of fondness rather than admiration:*

The animal is wholly inoffensive, and makes a most curiously affectionate even if rather an unintelligent pet. When brought up in captivity it becomes strangely dependent upon human society, and dis- likes being left alone. A Native Bear which has for long been treated as a pet becomes in the end a very exacting and babyish creature. . . . The whole animal smells strongly of eucalyptus, and its excretion of this pungent smelling substance is one of its drawbacks as a pet.

The distinctive individual characteristics of the koala are portrayed in fine style in his drawing (Fig. 13). The koala with pathetic phylogenetic senility clings to a branch of a tree: the mulgara sits erect with its head high, watchful and alert.

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Fig. 11. Phascolarcrus cinereus. Plantar aspect of left pes.

Fig. 12. Chaetocercus cristicuudu. From a female speci- men. Three-quarters natural size.

Wet-nosed animals Figure 14 is taken from the book The Matrix of the Mind published when Wood Jones was in Hon- olulu. The text readsL2

Lachrymal glands are present in order to keep the eye of the land-living animal moist. The moisture, which bathes the eye escapes down the tear duct and


Fig. 8. Diagram of the vertebral column of an animal in which the spinous processes are anteverted and retroverted to a definite centre of movement.

rigid backbone, has no dorsal centre of movement and no anticlinal vertebra.

The mammals of South Australia

Figures 9 , 10, 11, 12 and 13 are taken from Wood Jones' book The Mammals of South Australia, lished in three parts in the period 1923-1925.' It contains the prodigious total of 311 line drawn illustrations by the author. It is interesting to com- pare The Mammals of South Australia with the Aus- tralian Museum's 1983 publication the Complete Book of Australian Mammals, which has about the same amount of text material. The editorial team consisted of an editor-in-chief, seven section edi- tors and one hundred and seven contributors." All illustrations are offset photographs.

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S K U L L S

Wood Jones was a master at drawing skulls. In Figure 9, the skull of the Thylacinus (Tasmanian Tiger) is drawn from the dorsal aspect and in Fig. 10 from the ventral aspect. He remarked that 'The skull of Thylacinus is in its general rough outlines so like that of a dog that the reader who cares to proceed further will derive good insight into some of the most curious mammalian problems by noting not only the generalised likeness, but the special- ised total unlikeness of the two types' .'

PES OF THE KOALA'

This drawing of the pes of the koala (Fig. 11) was used again by Wood Jones in his R. M. Johnston Memorial Lecture in Hobart in 1925 entitled 'The Mammalian Toilet and Some Considerations Aris- ing from it'.'' In that lecture, when speaking of the conjoined pedal digits of the syndactylous marsupials he said:

In 1839 Sir Richard Owen wrote of these peculiar little toes that 'they look like little appendages at the

Fig. 9. Dorsal view of the skull of Thylacinus to show the principal bones entering into its formation. PM = premaxilla, M = maxilla, N = nasal, L = lachrymal, F = frontal, J = jugal, Z = zygomatic, P = parietal, ST = squamous temporal, SO = supraoccipital.

Fig. 10. Ventral view of the skull of Thylacinus. PM = premaxilla, M = maxilla, P = palate, J = jugal, Z = zygomatic, S = sphenoid, BO = basioccipital. The teeth have been removed on the right hand side of the figure in order to show the sockets for their roots.

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Sea birds

Figure 15 is from Wood Jones’ book Sea Birds Simplified, published in 1934 when he was in Mel- bourne. l 3 Every illustration is accompanied by a poem. One illustration with its corresponding poem is reproduced here:

The Mother Carey’s Chicken, or Stormy Petrel When seas are green and wet, And everyone’s upset, Because the ship is rolling like the dickens,

Then if your eyes are quick (And if you are not sick) You’ll see the little Mother Carey’s Chickens.

When tall ships stagger in the gale, And even sailormen turn pale, This little child of storms is sure to be.

For like the saint of olden time The Stormy Petrel walks sublime Upon the troubled surface of the sea.

Hair follicle

Figure 20 is found in the unpublished manuscript, ‘Twelve lectures on anatomy.’15 The best of Wood Jones’ texts to couple with this illustration is from another manuscript: ‘Human Anatomy for Students of Physical Anthropology’: which reads: ‘With the

Hair patterns of marsupials

Figures 16, 17, 18 and 19 are taken from Wood Jones’ book Habit and Heritage, published in 1943 when he was Professor of Anatomy at the Univer- sity of Manchester.I4 One of the most telling of his arguments for the inheritance of acquired characteristics is advanced in this book and these drawings illustrate his argument. He charted the hair pattern of many marsupials and found that the direction of the hair was determined by the manner in which they perform their hair toilet, that is the way they scratch themselves, the pattern varying according to the relative lengths of the hind and fore limbs.

Wood Jones found the charting of hair tracts was most easily done on pouch embryos, when the hairs were only just becoming apparent on the surface of the skin. This led to his statement that all hair tracts, however caused, were present in the embryo at the very earliest appearance of hair long before any activity could have determined their disposition. He wrote:

I see no reason, therefore, to modify the opinion that I expressed in 1924. Here we have a condition in which as soon as ever hair begins to appear upon the pouch young of a marsupial, and long before the little animal has any occasion to scratch itself, there is demonstrated the whole complexity of reversals, whorls and partings ingrained upon the coat by no more deep-seated, life-saving or useful process than the toilet methods adopted by its ancestors. If this is not, in the old hackneyed connotation of the term, a case of acquired characters being inherited, it is dif- ficult to conceive what circumstances could afford a satisfactory demonstration of that phenomenon.

Fig. 15. Poem in text

Fig. 16. The hair tracts of a kangaroo (Wullubia greyi) charted from a pouch-young.


so is carried into the cavity of the nose. The inside of the mammalian nose is kept moist, not only by its own secretion, but by reason of the tears that flow into it. It is a familiar thing that when a child cries it has to sniffle in order the prevent the tears running out of its nose. Normally our tears do not run out of our noses and the tips of our noses are therefore dry. Our nostrils are completely ringed round. But if we examine the nose of a primitive mammal we shall see that the nostril is not a complete ring, for the margin is slit up at one side and a gap is left in the ring. This gap is on the outer side of the nostril and it points along a line directed towards the inner angle of the eye. The line from the slit in the nostril to the inner angle of the eye marks the site of the tear duct; and this duct is formed by a meeting of skin over the line of its course. In an animal with a slit nostril, therefore, the tear duct is not so completely turned into the nasal chambers as it is in an animal whose nostril is completely ringed. In us, we must sniffle when we weep to prevent the tip of the nose becoming wet, but in the primitive mammal with the slit nostril the tip of the nose is always wet. The tears have served their turn by moistening the eye and washing foreign bodies from the sensitive translu- cent media, they have escaped by the tear duct and now fulfil a new role by moistening the tip of the naked mammalian rhinarium.

It may not be obvious to dry-nosed man what advantage there may be in having a rhinariurn of which the naked skin is constantly moist. Yet the advantage is real enough.

When the wind is very light, so light that one can see nothing moving that will tell the direction whence it blows, old sailing ship sailors will mois- ten a finger by licking it and, holding it aloft feel on its moistened surface the presence of what little wind there is. The moistened surface soon detects the presence of the moving air and appreciates from which direction it is moving.

A wet-nosed animal we would, therefore, expect to be an animal endowed with a high degree of olfactory sense and, moreover, one to which it was important that the direction whence the scent came should be realized. The wet-nosed animal might be the hunter or the hunted; to be efficient in either case a knowledge of whence comes the scent is essential.

The wet-nosed dog hunts by scent, the dry-nosed cat by sight. The wet-nosed dog follows its victim’s trail, the dry-nosed cat stalks it. Wet-nosed cattle graze with their noses towards the wind and recog- nise danger and take alarm from scents borne on the wind. Dry-nosed horses graze with their tails to the wind and recognize danger and take alarm at sights or sounds which seem possibly hostile. It is for the man who pits his intelligence against that of beasts to understand these things. The wet-nosed animals are the aristocrats of the smell world. They must always be a little ahead of all the other animals, for to associate position, direction, and possibly dis- tance with the receipt of a sensory stimulus is a very great gain indeed. We may, by sniffing to all points of the compass, find a direction of maximum inten- sity of a smell and so in the end localize it: but we all know how laborious this localizing process may be.

Fig. 13. General characters of Phuscofarctus cinereus. Note the way in which the 1st and 2nd digits of the left manus are opposed to the 3rd, 4th and 5th.

Fig. 14. The form of the nostril typical of those animals in which the sense of smell is highly important.

FREDERIC WOOD JONES

n

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Fig. 17. Hair tracts of Wallubia greyi (dorsal aspect).

Fig. 18. The hair tracts of a koala (Phscolarcrus cinereus) charted from a pouch-young.

exception of the eyelashes, hairs do not emerge at right angles to the surface. The hair shaft pierces the skin in an oblique direction, but in the white races the shaft and the root are in the same straight line. In the curly or frizzy haired negro races the follicles are themselves curved so that the hair

Fig. 19. Hair tracts of Phascolarcrus cinereus (dorsal aspect).

emerges as a bent bow instead of as a straight shaft’.

Calligrapher

A Medical Bulletin was a quarterly journal for the medical profession, published by May and Baker, which contained not a skemck of advertising. Be- tween 1953 and 1959 Wood Jones contributed nine articles to the journal, the last four being published posthumously. All were written under the pseudonym of Natterjack (the name of a common toad in Europe). Wood Jones kept pet Natterjacks in his London flat at the time he wrote these articles. Throughout his adult life the Wood Jones’ house- hold kept numerous pets both indoors and outdoors. When he lived in Adelaide he had a pet dingo called Mut which was rescued as a tiny ball of cream coloured fluff from a dingo scalper, in outback South Australia.

One of the Nattejack articles entitled ’To a Robin in Autumn’ was published as a holograph in the April issue of A Medical Bulletin in 1955.16 It ap- peared as part of an article concerning calligraphy and it was chosen as an example of Victorian copperplate handwriting. The whole of page 56 of that issue of A Medical Bulletin is reproduced as Fig. 21.

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Fig. 20. Section of a hair follicle showing the muscle (m) that produces erection of the hair. The sebaceous gland (g) is associated with the follicle.

The master

It was a student of his at St. Thomas’s, Cyril George Learoyd who wrote the following eulogy of Wood Jones. Dr Learoyd graduated from St. Thomas’s in 1915 and practised for many years near Rye in Sussex. The title of the poem is still used in reverence by many when refemng to Wood Jones. The poem reads:

Master, whose fire kindled our glad surprise, brought tropic seas to drear dissection room, so that we heard the thunder and the boom of surf on reef - and hark, the boobies’ cries - or vitulised some skull, unwound its scroll, or broughr some fossil form to life again. or thread of nerve in pickled flesh to pain, you made the living and the dead one whole. So when we wandered all the earth we sensed your voice and watched your clear-cut features play, pausing, perhaps, in moments of that bliss offinding some rare thing, triumphant, tensed, seeking to share our joy, then would we say, ‘What would I give to hear Wood Jones on this!’

Wood Jones’ genius as a teacher was ascribable in part to his ability as an illustrator. His illustrations effectively illtnninate and make clear to the mind the text or lectures with which they are associated.

Fig. 21. Readers who have enjoyed articles printed over the name of Natterjack will be interested to learn that these came from the distinguished pen of the late Profes- sor Wood Jones. The verses printed above were almost the last contribution which he sent to us. We reproduce them here in their original form as an example of the beautiful yet cursive hand which could be developed from the now often despised ‘Victorian copperplate’.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and advice given by Professor R. G. Elmslie in the preparation of this manuscript.

I would like to thank Mr James Guest for his permission to reproduce the drawings of lips in his possession and I would also like to thank May and Baker and The Royal Society of Tasmania for permission to publish material from their journals, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England for permission to use material from their Library.

Acknowledgement is also due to the following publishers for permission to reproduce material from books by Frederic Wood Jones: Government Printer of South Australia, Edward Arnold, Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, and Routledge.

The Clinical Photography Department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital kindly prepared the illustrations for publication and for that I am most grateful.

1.

2.

References WOOD JON= F. (1899) ‘Nineteen Pencil, Pen and Black Ink and Watercolours of Lizards, Geckoes and Snakes’. Original drawings held by Dr B. Christophers. WWD JONES F. (circa 1904-09) ‘Sixty-Seven Ana- tomical Drawings’. Original drawings held by Mr James Guest.


3. ‘Memorandum of Agreement between Dr F. Wood Jones and Edward Amold, publisher’ (1909). Lodged in the Wood Jones’ Collection in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

4. WOOD JONES F. (1946) Buchamn’s Manual of Amto- my (Ed. F . Wood Jones), Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, London.

5. WOOD JONES F. (circa 1928) Human Anatomy for Students of Physical Anthropology. Original manuscript lodged in the Wood Jones’ Collection in the Libraty of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

6. WOOD JONES F . (1916) Arboreal Man, Edward Amold, London.

7. WOOD JONES F. (1923) The Mammals of South Aus- tralia, Part I . The Monotremes and the Carnivorous Marsupials. The Ornithodelphia and the Didactylous Didelphia. Government Printer, Adelaide.

8. WOOD JONFS F. (1924) The Mammals of South Aus- tralia. Part 11. The Bandicoots and Herbivorous Marsupials. Government Printer, Adelaide.

9. WOOD JONES F. (1925) The Mammals of South Aus-

tralia, Part I I I . The Monodelphia. Government Printer, Adelaide.

10. STRAHAN R . (Ed.) (1983) The Australian Museum. Complete Book of Australian Mammals, Angus and Robertson, London.

11. WOOD JONES F. (1925) The mammalian toilet and some considerations arising from it. Pap. Proc. Roy. Soc. Tas, 14-62.

12. WOOD JONES F. & PORTEUS S. D. (1928) The Matrix of the Mind. University Press Association, Honolulu.

13. WOOD JONES F. (1934) Seabirds Simplified, Edward Arnold, London.

14. WOOD JONES F. (1943) Habit and Heritage, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, London.

15. WOOD JONES F. (1952) Twelve Lectures on Anatomy. Original manuscript lodged in the Wood Jones’ Collection in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

16. WOOD JONES F. (1955) To a robin in autumn. A Medi- cal Bulletin 3, 56.

17. LEAROYD C. G. (1954) The master. Lmcet, ii, 813.