In 1578 John Banister published a book entitled The Historie of Man, sucked from the Sappe of the most approued Anathomistes. The title indicates the character of the work, drawn from continental authorities, and especially from Colombo, despite the fact that Banister was Reader in Anatomy to the United Company and therefore in a position to undertake independent researches. Indeed, a contemporary painting shows Banister in his capacity as Reader standing beside an open copy of Colombo’s De Re Anatomica.[50]
It is clearly apparent that English anatomy in the Tudor period remained far behind that of the Continent, at least on the basis of such books as were published in England, and thereby renders that modest but early effort of David Edwardes all the more curious.
Edwardes, it must be recalled, had presented his brief treatise in the same form which was being employed on the Continent, and we may assume that it represented his method. What he did was to ignore medieval writers and return directly to Galen, the supreme authority of that age, the ‘Prince of Physicians’. Coupled with this, he had begun to dissect, first, it may be assumed, for better comprehension of Galen but ultimately by Edwardes or his successors, discrepancies between the text of Galen and the observed anatomy would at once have indicated the classic error and the path to knowledge. Such was the course of continental development, but English anatomy of the period was faced by an insurmountable obstacle.
Whereas the medical faculties of continental universities came to accept anatomy, such was not to be the case with English medicine until well into the seventeenth century. As a result, anatomy was not an end in itself but rather a limited field of knowledge learned in so far as it might be usefully applied in surgery.
There were, of course, some Englishmen whose training and knowledge were superior to the quality demonstrated in English texts, men who had had Paduan training such as Caius and Harvey. But even Caius remained a Galenist when continental anatomy had become Vesalian, and Harvey, despite his thoroughly scientific attitude in respect to physiology, remained very conservative in his approach to purely anatomical problems, seeking authority not only in Galen but in the even more ancient Aristotle.
Under these conditions it seems remarkable that such great contributions were made to physiology in seventeenth-century England. The contributions of Harvey, Boyle, Hooke, and Lower form an amazing contrast to the static and even retrograde position of anatomy in the preceding century. In 1565 John Halle, a distinguished surgeon, published his Anatomy or Dissection of the Body of Man which was largely a translation of the surgery of Guido Lanfranc who died in 1315, yet fifty-one years later Harvey had arrived at the circulation of the blood.[51]
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1]Maurice Davidson, Medicine in Oxford, Oxford, 1953, pp. 15 ff.
[2]H. D. Rolleston, The Cambridge Medical School, Cambridge, 1932, pp. 1 ff.
[3]J. F. South, Memorials of the Craft of Surgery in England, ed. D’Arcy Power, London, 1886, pp. 14-15; Austin T. Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London, London, 1890, p. 24.