Hereafter, if God permit, I shall compose a complete book of anatomy in which I shall further the opinions of all the learned, to which my own opinion will be added. I could have done this at present but not, however, with the same effort or with the form of an introduction preserved. It remains that this little book, which we have enlisted in the service of the commonwealth, may be pleasing to you, for it recognizes the existence of those very few unlearned physicians by whose mistakes many perish, from which this fact will be gathered, that no parts of the body should be unknown to physicians.
This promise of a more extensive work in which the author was to include his independent anatomical observations, presumably based on further human dissection, appears not to have been fulfilled or, at any rate, there is no record of any such later and more extended anatomical treatise by Edwardes.
The text of this Introduction to Anatomy fills no more than fifteen small pages, and its very brevity must have made it virtually useless; even the author says that it ‘is indeed a slight work’. The plan of presentation is that which had been popularized by Mundinus and was required by the relative speeds with which the different parts of the body succumbed to putrefaction during the course of dissection. Thus Edwardes first describes the lower venter, that is, the abdomen, abdominal cavity, and pelvis, next the thorax, and finally the brain and nervous system. Within his very brief presentation no mention is made of the extremities while, relative to the limits of the discussion, a preponderance of attention has been devoted to what were considered the organs of nutrition and blood manufacture.
The anatomical nomenclature is mildly astonishing, especially when one considers the time and place of composition. But if one considers that Edwardes was sufficiently learned in Greek to act as Reader in Greek at his college for a short period, it will not be too amazing to find him somewhat scornful of the terms employed by those he calls ‘Barbarians’, that is, the European school influenced by Moslem medical writers, chiefly through the Canon of Avicenna, which employed an anatomical terminology drawn from Latin and from curious hybrid forms partly Latin, partly Greek, partly Arabic and in some parts from Hebrew. Edwardes, on the contrary, employs classical Greek terminology as, for example, omentum rather than the medieval zirbus and mesenteric in preference to meseraic. In so far as his description extends, his nomenclature is as ‘modern’, if not more so, than that of some of the more learned anatomists on the Continent. Yet, while his vocabulary may be more modern his anatomy is not. Indeed, in the introduction he remarked, as has been mentioned, that in the future he hoped to write a more extensive work ‘to which my own opinion will be added’. By implication, then, in this first brief treatise he had drawn upon earlier authorities, and while we might expect that this student of Greek would turn to Galen and Hippocrates this is true only in part. The liver as he describes it is medieval, the three-chambered heart is Aristotelian, derived from those ‘Barbarians’ he scorned.
While the treatise is noteworthy as the first work written in England solely devoted to anatomy, the text intrinsically is of little further value except for one statement referring to the emulgent, or renal veins. ‘In the body of that one whom we dissected very recently the left branch had a higher place of origin. Very often, however, the opposite occurs, so that the right emulgent vein is carried higher in the body.’ Here we have the first reference to human dissection in England, in which, moreover, the anatomist observing through his own eyes rather than those of past authorities, noted a variation from the commonly given description of the emulgent veins, a description derived from Galen’s anatomical studies on animals.
Little more can be said about Edwardes. He seems to have died about 1542,[35] and perhaps this explains why the larger work was never to be published. Perhaps, had he remained at Oxford, he might have established an anatomical tradition, and so provided the influence which his book was not to have. Today only one copy of this little treatise is known, that in the library of the British Museum, and no consideration appears to have been paid to it from Edwardes’s day to the present. However, its virtual extinction was not the result of hard usage by students such as that which determined the almost complete annihilation of Vesalius’ Tabulae Anatomicae. As has been said, no contemporary mentioned Edwardes, despite the fact that his book was published in London. The edition must have been a small one, and copies were not likely to have been preserved as other and better works on anatomy began to be imported from the Continent.
Meanwhile the universities continued their drowsy course so far unaffected in any way by the efforts of an alumnus of one of them. The barber-surgeons and surgeons appear to have been equally unproductive of anything new, still leaning upon earlier continental writers. Yet a few individuals recognized the need for improvement. Well before the surgeons of England received official encouragement for anatomical study the surgeons of Edinburgh had asked for and obtained bodies for dissection. On 1 July 1505 the magistrates of Edinburgh granted a Seal of Cause to the Guild of Surgeons and Barbers, and this was confirmed by James IV on 13 October 1506. Among the clauses regulating the practice of the barbers and the surgeons is one giving them the body of one felon each year for an anatomy:
... and that we may have anis [once] in the yeir ane condampnit man efter he be deid to mak antomell of, quhairthraw we may haif experience, ilk ane to instrict vtheris ... and that na barbour, maister nor seruand, within this burgh hantt [practise] vse nor exerce the craft of Surregenrie without he be expert and knaw perfytelie the thingis abouewritten.[36]
Edinburgh, therefore, was the cradle of anatomical study in the British Isles. In England Thomas Linacre had founded the College of Physicians of London in 1518 with the idea of its being a select body of physicians to raise medical standards and maintain them through its power of licensing to practice. The need of more modern surgical texts was indicated by the publication in 1525 of a translation of the work of the late fifteenth-century German surgeon, Hieronymus Brunschwig, which contained a brief section on anatomy, but there appears to have been no attempt to produce a new and up-to-date surgery in England. The fact was that the more advanced books from continental Europe proceeded to smother any continuance of independent native efforts, and in the field of anatomy this makes the early appearance of David Edwardes’s little treatise an astonishing chronological anomaly in the history of English anatomical writing. The importance of anatomy was now to be recognized, but it would be a long time before another native English treatise on the subject was published.
The introduction of the officially recognized, and even encouraged, study of human anatomy into England was the result of influences brought to bear from several sources: the desire of King Henry VIII to improve the practice of medicine and surgery in England and possibly, too, with thoughts for a higher quality of military surgery; and the desire, as well, of some of the more thoughtful surgeons, of whom Thomas Vicary was probably one. So it was that in 1540 the Company of Barbers was united with the Fraternity of Surgeons to form what was called the United Company of Barber-Surgeons of which Thomas Vicary was named Master in 1541, an event handsomely commemorated in a painting commissioned from Hans Holbein the younger.[37]