The medieval church prohibited human dissection. (Refuted).

[Quill & Ink History.]

Hi everyone!

I just made a new video refuting the claim that the medieval church prohibited the practice of human dissection. If you could watch it and give some critique and your own thoughts on the subject I would appreciate it a loot.

Note: If I don´t respond to your comments feel free to remind me via text messing. I have had problems ealier with not getting email notifications when someone has responded to one of my comments.


Best wishes!

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I have seen similar unfounded claims elsewhere.

A common claim seen on the internet, wikipedia and most websites, and even in articles on medical history, is that the Romans prohibited human dissection in 150 BC. This is nonsense. There is nothing in Varro or the later code of Justinian to support this. Desecration of a grave is prohibited, but nothing disallows dissection.

The claim is often made because Galen, the premiere anatomist before Vesalius, made most of his findings based on barbary apes, pig and dog dissection. However, Galen's own writings refer to a human skeleton, from a dissection performed, as a student in Alexandria. We know Herophilus and Erasistratus performed medical dissections in the 300s BC there as well.

The problem here is not prohibition, but societal pressure and lack of cadavers. Even in our modern world we have problems securing sufficient cadavers. I am a doctor and we dissected a cadaver, 6 students per body, in my second year of medical school. The university failed to procure more. Most people do not want to be dissected and few families donate their loved ones for this. So unclaimed bodies of unknown persons are what we mostly dissect today. With lower populations in the old times, even fewer bodies would be available. Most people are also uncomfortable when we tell them that we have dissected a body during our medical training.

Each student was given a bag of human bones to take home for instance, when we were doing anatomy. A lot of my peers tell stories of how their parents were freaked out by it or how they freaked people out with it themselves. One was even detained by the police when they found a bag of human bones in the boot of his car.

Anyway, I think the Christian opposition to vivisection such as in Tertullian, certainly played a part. I think the mediaeval anatomists were being cautious, lest they be accused of grave robbing or impiety. The Scholastical medical education's reliance on Galen certainly didn't help, as one could argue it was unnecessary as descriptions were already available. They wouldn't have known them to be so deficient.

 

[Quill & Ink History.]

Hi Quid est Veritas?! Thank you for responding to my tread.

I have seen similar unfounded claims elsewhere.

A common claim seen on the internet, wikipedia and most websites, and even in articles on medical history, is that the Romans prohibited human dissection in 150 BC. This is nonsense. There is nothing in Varro or the later code of Justinian to support this. Desecration of a grave is prohibited, but nothing disallows dissection.

The claim is often made because Galen, the premiere anatomist before Vesalius, made most of his findings based on barbary apes, pig and dog dissection. However, Galen's own writings refer to a human skeleton from a dissection performed as a student in Alexandria. We know Herophilus and Erasistratus performed medical dissections in the 300s BC there as well.

This is incorrect. It´s widely accepted among scholars that human dissection was discouraged in ancient society which not only included ancient Rome but also ancient Greece before the roman conquest. This is something any academic literature that goes over ancient medicine will tell you. It´s true that human dissection was practiced during a short period in the Alexandrian Museum in Egypt during the Ptolemaic reign but this is a rare exception in the ancient world and was not true anywhere else(Galen certainly did not dissect any human cadaver). There are several theories to why human dissection was tolerated in the Alexandrian Museum during this brief period of time. The three explanations to why this happened that I know of ranges from a Platonic conception of the soul and it´s relationship to the body, that human dissection had been practiced in ancient Egypt in earlier times for religious reasons and that the Alexandrian Museum had the support from the Ptolemaic kings which allowed them to steam roll ancient taboos and customs if they considered it necessary.

If you are interested in ancient science I recommend the book The beginnings of western science by David C Lindberg which is arguably the best overview of ancient and medieval history available.

Best Wishes

Quill

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Hi Quid est Veritas?! Thank you for responding to my tread.



This is incorrect. It´s widely accepted among scholars that human dissection was discouraged in ancient society which not only included ancient Rome but also ancient Greece before the roman conquest. This is something any academic literature that goes over ancient medicine will tell you. It´s true that human dissection was practiced during a short period in the Alexandrian Museum in Egypt during the Ptolemaic reign but this is a rare exception in the ancient world and was not true anywhere else(Galen certainly did not dissect any human cadaver). There are several theories to why human dissection was tolerated in the Alexandrian Museum during this brief period of time. The three explanations to why this happened that I know of ranges from a Platonic conception of the soul and it´s relationship to the body, that human dissection had been practiced in ancient Egypt in earlier times for religious reasons and that the Alexandrian Museum had the support from the Ptolemaic kings which allowed them to steam roll ancient taboos and customs if they considered it necessary.

If you are interested in ancient science I recommend the book The beginnings of western science by David C Lindberg which is arguably the best overview of ancient and medieval history available.

Best Wishes

Quill

Sorry, there seems to be some confusion here. I forgot two commas. Galen saw a skeleton from a previous dissection, I did not mean to imply he had performed it. I have corrected it.

As I said, there was societal pressure discouraging it, as you seem to agree with as well, as there was in the middle ages. However, there was no legal prohibition in Roman Law, in spite of numerous such claims I have read over the years. I am well aware of the short period of Hellenistic dissection that we have on record, but there are some equivocal evidence that other dissections may have been performed. I'll look for it and post it here when I have the time.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Just to add:

Galen claims to have dissected about 30 human bodies in his various writings, if we tally them. Most notably there is the tale of him dissecting bodies washed out by a storm. However, Andreas Vesalius challenged these claims when he found multiple errors in Galen's anatomy. Now Galen also reported dissecting pigs and apes, so Vesalius put a human skeleton next to that of an ape, or a female dog's genitals next to a humans, and could thus show how Galen had extrapolated one to the other. This has led to the modern claim that "Galen didn't dissect any humans" in spite of his own claims to the contrary.

Now Vesalius himself made a number of errors, such as continuing to multiply the lobes of the liver, and he certainly did dissect humans, and far more than Galen had claimed. So I don't think this sufficient grounds to discount Galen's own statements completely. Before modern embalming techniques with formaline and so forth, bodies rotted quickly. Taking into account transport and the difficulty one had in obtaining corpses, it is no surprise these early anatomists made such significant errors.

Galen was also asked by Marcus Aurelius to accompany his Germanic campaigns, but managed to evade this. He was later sorry he had done so, as Marcus Aurelius had allowed some of the accompanying doctors to dissect German corpses. Limited dissection did occur. I shall look for the original texts when I have time, but I have family responsibilities at the moment.

You should also remember that there was probably a medical rivalry between the Empirikoi, who said all you needed to know could be found out from observing the living, and the Logikoi, that examined corpses and other living things to extrapolate to humans. This can be seen in Celsus, who wrote of the rivalry, and this has been implicated in the decline of dissection following Herophilus' day (In fact, Philinus of Cos, the founder of the Empirikoi, had likely been a pupil of his).

Anyway, I have attached an interesting article related to the decline of dissection, which explains both this rivalry and societal taboos as to impurity, and why the situation during the Alexandrian height of dissection and thereafter was not markedly different, that no legal prohibition has been recorded in Ptolemaic Egypt (as after all, they still mummified, which largely amounts to dissection). This is similar to my before mentioned lack of evidence of Roman legal prohibitions of the practice, but sometimes even reputable article writers repeat this common fudge, instead of actually looking at the Roman sources and lack thereof. It is thus a very similar situation to the claim that the Mediaeval Church had done so, which is also an error some reputably mediaevalists fall into, as you well know.

 

[Quill & Ink History.]

Just to add:

Galen claims to have dissected about 30 human bodies in his various writings, if we tally them. Most notably there is the tale of him dissecting bodies washed out by a storm. However, Andreas Vesalius challenged these claims when he found multiple errors in Galen's anatomy. Now Galen also reported dissecting pigs and apes, so Vesalius put a human skeleton next to that of an ape, or a female dog's genitals next to a humans, and could thus show how Galen had extrapolated one to the other. This has led to the modern claim that "Galen didn't dissect any humans" in spite of his own claims to the contrary.

Now Vesalius himself made a number of errors, such as continuing to multiply the lobes of the liver, and he certainly did dissect humans, and far more than Galen had claimed. So I don't think this sufficient grounds to discount Galen's own statements completely. Before modern embalming techniques with formaline and so forth, bodies rotted quickly. Taking into account transport and the difficulty one had in obtaining corpses, it is no surprise these early anatomists made such significant errors.

Galen was also asked by Marcus Aurelius to accompany his Germanic campaigns, but managed to evade this. He was later sorry he had done so, as Marcus Aurelius had allowed some of the accompanying doctors to dissect German corpses. Limited dissection did occur. I shall look for the original texts when I have time, but I have family responsibilities at the moment.

You should also remember that there was probably a medical rivalry between the Empirikoi, who said all you needed to know could be found out from observing the living, and the Logikoi, that examined corpses and other living things to extrapolate to humans. This can be seen in Celsus, who wrote of the rivalry, and this has been implicated in the decline of dissection following Herophilus' day (In fact, Philinus of Cos, the founder of the Empirikoi, had likely been a pupil of his).

Anyway, I have attached an interesting article related to the decline of dissection, which explains both this rivalry and societal taboos as to impurity, and why the situation during the Alexandrian height of dissection and thereafter was not markedly different, that no legal prohibition has been recorded in Ptolemaic Egypt (as after all, they still mummified, which largely amounts to dissection). This is similar to my before mentioned lack of evidence of Roman legal prohibitions of the practice, but sometimes even reputable article writers repeat this common fudge, instead of actually looking at the Roman sources and lack thereof. It is thus a very similar situation to the claim that the Mediaeval Church had done so, which is also an error some reputably mediaevalists fall into, as you well know.

Hi again! Sorry for a late response and thank you for your last comment. You have given me some new food for thought, I have not read any of the primary sources on the subject and I think that I need to reread my secondary literature on the subject and critically examine what they say on the view of human dissection in the ancient world. Im downloading the article you shared at the moment.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I said I'd come back with primary sources. It took a while, but I have finally done so:


Celsus, De Medicinae:

“Moreover, as pains, and also various kinds of diseases, arise in the more internal parts, they hold that no one can apply remedies for these who is ignorant about the parts themselves; hence it becomes necessary to lay open the bodies of the dead and to scrutinize their viscera and intestines."

“But to lay open the bodies of men whilst still alive is as cruel as it is needless; that of the dead is a necessity for learners, who should know positions and relations, which the dead body exhibits better than does a living and wounded man."


Galen, On Anatomical Procedures:

"Therefore if you see frequently in monkeys the position and size of each tendon and nerve, and remember them accurately, and if sometime you have the opportunity of dissecting a human body, you will find each as you have observed it; but if you are entirely without practice, you will profit not at all from such opportunities, as those doctors who in the Germanic Wars having opportunity to dissect barbarian bodies, did not learn more than butchers."

In the same text we read Galen talking of examining a dead criminal and washed out corpses and such. Galen is more interested in talking about the anatomy, than the methods to procure subjects though.

"But if you cannot, it is still possible to see something of human bones. I, at least, have done so often on the breaking open of a grave or tomb. Thus once a river, inundating a recent hastily made grave, broke it up, washing away the body. The flesh had putrefied, though the bones still held together in their proper relations. It was carried down a stadium and, reaching marshy ground, drifted ashore. This skeleton and body was as if prepared for elementary teaching. And on another occasion we saw the skeleton of a brigand, lying on rising ground a little off the road. He had been killed by some traveller repelling his attack. The inhabitants would not bury him, glad enough to see his body consumed by the birds which, in a couple of days, ate his flesh, leaving the skeleton as if for demonstration. If you have not the luck to see anything of this sort, dissect an ape and, having removed the flesh, observe each bone with care."


Eustathius of Antioch, Commentary on the Six Days of Creation:

"the best of doctors, hoping to accomplish something beneficial for human life, petition that those who have been condemned to death be given over to them for dissection."


There are other sources, but I am sure this would suffice. I find it quite ridiculous that this old canard of Romans prohibiting dissection is peddled and is quite ubiquitous on internet searches on the subject. Celsus writes of vivisection of live humans, as does Tertullian. Some argue Celsus is refering to the Alexandrine dissection period (as Tertullian is), but there is really nothing in the text to support this but supposition. Theophanes in his Chronographica (admittedly in the 8th century) wrote how a barbarian chief was dissected alive at Constantinople for medical research.
The Romans were very cruel if need be, to slaves, barbarians and rebels. They crucified people in odd postures and left bodies to rot on crosses as warnings, as for instance after the Servile War. That people think the Romans outlawed human dissection; in lieue of any textual evidence of such a prohibition, and active evidence of both dissection and vivisection occuring amongst them, with their known penchant for cruelty when judged necessary; is silly, and likely just a holdover of Victorians idealising them.