History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new; its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he foresaw must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor Charles V, and in his preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text-books; he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the ancient master. The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the manner of their time their first missiles were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons—weapons theologic.

In this case there were especial reasons why the theological authorities felt called upon to intervene. First, there was the old idea prevailing in the Church that the dissection of the human body is forbidden to Christians: this was used with great force against Vesalius, but he at first gained a temporary victory; for, a conference of divines having been asked to decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a decision in the negative.

The reason was simple: the great Emperor Charles V had made Vesalius his physician and could not spare him; but, on the accession of Philip II to the throne of Spain and the Netherlands, the whole scene changed. Vesalius now complained that in Spain he could not obtain even a human skull for his anatomical investigations: the medical and theological reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a rule, had it in Spain ever since. As late as the last years of the eighteenth century an observant English traveller found that there were no dissections before medical classes in the Spanish universities, and that the doctrine of the circulation of the blood was still denied, more than a century and a half after Sarpi and Harvey had proved it.

Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius. Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible—the necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his collected works.(320)

(320) For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here and there
during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius, Berlin, 1892, pp.
3, 13 et seq. For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution
of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725;
Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest
and most thorough of all, Roth, as above. Even Goethals, despite the
timidity natural to a city librarian in a town like Brussels, in which
clerical power is strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that
there was a certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment
of Vesalius. See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale. For the
resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes. For
Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la Chirurgie,
Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407. For neglect of dissection and opposition
to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792,
cited in Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. ii, pp. 74,
75. Also Henry Morley, in his Clement Marot, and Other Essays. For
Bernouilli and his trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien
zur Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95. How different
Mundinus's practice of dissection was from that of Vesalius may be seen
by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire number of dissections by
the former was three; the usual statement is that there were but two.
See Cuvier, Hist. des Sci. Nat., tome ii, p. 7; also Sprengel, Fredault,
Hallam, and Littre. Also Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol.
iii, p. 328; also, for a very full statement regarding the agency of
Mundinus in the progress of Anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, pp. 209-216.

Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius. During the Middle Ages there had been developed various theological doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon arguments showing what the body OUGHT TO BE, and naturally, when anatomical science showed what it IS, these doctrines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year in which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals, and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing this dealt a blow at much else in the sacred theory. Naturally, all these considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism against the innovators in anatomy.(321)

(321) As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the Gesta
Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis,... descripta a magistro Rigardo, 1219,
edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in Histories Francorum Scriptores,
tom. v, Paris, 1649, p. 24. For representations of Adam created by the
Almighty out of a pile of dust, and of Eve created from a rib of Adam,
see the earlier illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle. As to the
relation of anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp.
154, 155.

A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.