University of Nevada, Reno Blurring the Lines: Private and Public Dissection in Renaissance Italy A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of History By Kalina Yamboliev Dr. Bruce Moran, Thesis Advisor May, 2010 UNIVERSITY THE HONORS PROGRAM OF NEVADA RENO We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by KALINA YAMBOLIEV entitled Blurring the Lines: Private and Public Dissection in Renaissance Italy Be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of BACHELOR OF HISTORY _________________________________________________ Dr. Bruce Moran, Department of History; Faculty Mentor _________________________________________________ Tamara Valentine, Director; Honors Program i -Abstract- From the fourteenth through the eighteenth century in Europe human dissection came to be practiced for a variety of purposes. Private dissections, in the forms of judicial, holy, and maternal anatomies, were performed, respectively, for the purposes of generating medical evidence that could be used in court, finding markings inside of a holy individual’s body that would confirm his or her sainthood, and to diagnose diseases which could have negative implications for the future of a family. Public dissections, on the other hand, were performed in university settings as a demonstrative and didactic technique, as well as a sort of public spectacle to gain attention and prestige for the institution hosting the event. This paper will delve deeper into these varieties of dissection, both public and private, as well as the extents to which they intersected and worked together to build off of one another. The final part of the paper will also consider an important anatomical figure – Andreas Vesalius – who performed anatomical work both privately and publically and who, with the publishing of his famous anatomical text De humani corporis fabrica in 1543, revolutionized medical and anatomical practice forever. ii -Table of Contents- Abstract……………………………………………………………………………… i Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………. ii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………….. iii I. Introduction and Definitions……………………………………………......... 1 II. Private Dissection a. Judicial Anatomy………………………………………………………… 3 b. Holy Anatomy…………………………………………………………… 4 c. Maternal Anatomy………………………………………………………. 13 III. Public Dissections a. University Dissection……………………………………………………. 19 b. Anatomical Theatres…………………………………………………....... 25 IV. Andreas Vesalius……………………………………………………………. 29 a. The Fabrica…………………………………………………………....... 33 V. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….. 40 VI. Works Cited………………………………………………………………… 42 VII. Images and Illustrations…………………………………………………...... 43 iii -List of Figures- Figure 1 Early anatomical theater…………………………………………………… 43 Figure 2 Later anatomical theater…………………………………………………… 43 Figure 3 Sample “muscle man” from Berengario da Carpi’s Isagogue Breves……. 44 Figure 4 Illustration of foot from Berengario da Carpi’s Isagogue Breves……….... 44 Figure 5 Sample “muscle man” from Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica………………… 44 Figure 6 Illustration of foot from Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica…………………….. 44 Figure 7a-d Historiated initial letters from Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica……………… 45 Figure 8 Title page of Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica, 1543…………………………. 46 Figure 9 Portrait of Andreas Vesalius.……………………………………………... 46 1 -Introduction and Definitions- In the winter of 1286 a curious epidemic afflicting humans and chickens struck parts of Northern Italy. In Cremona, one physician opened a dead chicken, and found an unusual abscess on the tip of the heart. He found the same sort of growth on a human heart when he later opened a corpse, occasioning the first explicit and reliable reference to the exposition of a human body in Western Europe. Yet examination of the human cadaver was already being performed in nearby cities like Bologna, where such investigation could provide helpful information for criminal cases, or to satisfy a growing medical curiosity1. Often this sort of inspection was of the external body, however, and this is precisely why the Cremona dissection is unique. It demonstrates that both medical expertise and intellectual curiosity had matured to such a degree that merely external observation could no longer satisfy the desire to understand the basic workings of the human mechanism. At this point the move to internal investigation was fully on the horizon. The practice of dissection would achieve great popularity in the following centuries and would come to be widely practiced during the Renaissance in a number of European countries, though most especially in Italy and France. For the aims of this discussion I will define “dissection” as the act of artificially separating the different parts of a body for the purpose of examination, discovery, or analysis of anatomical structure, function, and appearance, of the location, or organization of constituent parts of the body, or of the body as a whole. This procedure could take the form of a “private” or a “public” dissection, each of which was driven by different purposes and performed for specific audiences. Throughout this discussion, “private” dissection will refer to the opening of a human cadaver in a more concealed location 1 Park, Katherine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. Zone Books: New York, 2006, p. 78. 2 such as an individual’s home or in a church, and not open to general attendance. “Public” dissection will signify operations performed for a broader audience, and in an open setting such as a university classroom or “anatomical theatre.” Although the dissections were distinguished as either “private” or “public” in terminology and in theory, in practice the boundary was very fluid and unstable. Considering the distinction between the two realms raises many questions for consideration: Who was performing these procedures and how did they do it? What information was being sought, and what was being discovered? Who attended the procedures, and what is it that each person needed to know about the human body? From the start of the fourteenth century, dissection would be undertaken for autoptical diagnosis, embalming, and innovative discovery and analysis, and through the late seventeenth century it would serve purposes of didacticism, civic demonstration and prestige. And as the practice acquired a longer standing and greater breadth of purpose, its practitioners were increasingly difficult to classify as either purely “private” or entirely “public”: they had roles in the courts of justice and in the sphere of public education, but they also made some of the discoveries for which the history of medicine most remembers them in the seclusion of their private laboratories. The blurring of the boundaries is best illustrated by the cases of the most memorable figures in the early history of dissection—the fourteenth- century Italian physician and instructor Bartolomeo da Varignana, the sixteenth-century Italian physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and particularly, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Italian instructor and practitioner Andreas Vesalius. Understanding that private and public practices worked in unison at this time, when the medical perception of the human body was passing through some very significant changes, is important to appreciate the steps necessary to develop a realistic understanding of the human body. And indeed, such an 3 understanding developed very gradually: dissection would ultimately provide a great deal of information important in university education and for a comprehensive medical practice, but its initial applications were in situations that were far more exclusive. -Private Dissections- -Judicial Anatomy Individuals aware of the dissection in Cremona in 1286, such as Franciscan friar Fra Salimbene, seem to have recorded the event with considerable casualness,2 reminding us that such procedures were not entirely unusual at this time. Bodies had been observed for centuries previously, even though most examinations were only external and therefore only partial. Even the records of a body examined by surgeon William of Saliceto in 1275, just a decade before the Cremona dissection, indicate that observation was reserved mostly to the exterior of the body.3 As he investigated whether certain wounds had been severe enough to have caused the individual’s death, William was significantly restricted in the information he was able to gather. Still, this sort of post-mortem examination of the human cadaver began to spread and develop into a practice called “Judicial anatomy,” resorted to for both medical and legal purposes.4 Judicial dissection originated in Italian urban centers like Rome and especially Bologna, and though they were still extremely rare at the beginning of the fourteenth century, some of the earliest instances remain on record. In February of 1302, for example, a dissection was performed on a man, Azzolino degli Onesti, who had recently died under suspicion of poisoning. Through evidence gathered during a post-mortem investigation of the body, the medical 2 O’Malley, C.D. Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514‐1564. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964, p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 12. 4 Secrets of Women, p. 88. 4 practitioners involved – two physicians and three surgeons – were able to conclude that the cause of death had been natural.5 As its uses became more apparent, dissection was employed more regularly in instances of suspected murder,