Medieval Treatises on the Body

Medieval Treatises on the Body
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, art and anatomy both experienced an awakening, fostered by legislative changes the decline of religious teaching and reactions to criminal violence or epidemic diseases.

Municipalities, especially in Italy, were pressured to permit dissection in order to determine cause of death in cases of murder of other unusual situations.

The rise of secular universities also contributed to the increase of dissection. In Christian tradition, the body was linked to sin and the temporal existence of the profane world.

Learning about its inner workings was not only unnecessary but it could jeopardize salvation, because the literal interpretation of Scripture anticipated the resurrection of the soul within an intact body.

As a result, the church did not condone dissection. Images of anatomic from the medieval period emphasize the barbarity of the act. Sometimes, the pope granted special dispensations for certain medical schools, such as Montpellier in southern France, but the subjects were executed criminals – or, on rape occasions, living criminals, who may have been sentenced to death by vivisection.

Legal dissections were ritualized and infrequent – once or twice a ear, for example; in some places, only once every five years. The professor sat high above the scene reading from a Latin edition of Galen.

The demonstrators were often illiterate barbers, who dissected in conjunction with lesson.

As a result, the words of Galen could persist unchallenged. Differences between the cadaver and a Galenic ideal were explained by the imperfection of the (usually criminal) mortal.
Medieval Treatises on the Body