One day in 1788, students at the Hunterian School of Medicine in London were opening a cadaver when they discovered something startling. The dead man’s anatomy was a mirror image of normal. His liver was on his left side instead of the right. His heart had beaten on his right side, not his left.

The students had never seen anything like it, and they rushed to find their teacher, the Scottish physician Matthew Baillie, who was just as stunned as they were. “It is so extraordinary as scarcely to have been seen by any of the most celebrated anatomists,” he later wrote.

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The stories of scientists create new scientists. Alexander von Humboldt — the most famous naturalist of the early 19th century — chronicled his epic expeditions, between 1799 and 1804, in his “Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.” When a nature-loving student at Cambridge named Charles Darwin read the book, it changed his life. He read passages aloud to his professors and learned Spanish so that he could follow in Humboldt’s footsteps.

Continue reading “Apes” →