All this of anatomical development in Italy at universities that were directly under the ecclesiastical authorities would seem to settle all question of interference by the Popes or the Church with any phase of anatomical development. It does not seem sufficient for Dr. White, however. When I called attention to all these details of the history of anatomy, long before the reformation and before Vesalius, Dr. White's response was the following paragraph in which he explains how dissection came to be practiced at all, and reiterates not only his belief that Pope Boniface's bull prevented dissection, but even insists on what cannot but seem utterly absurd to any one who has read even the brief account I have given here, that except at one or two places, and then only to a very limited degree, dissection was not practiced at all. Here is how the history of dissection must be viewed according to Dr. White:--
"But Dr. Walsh elsewhere falls back on the fact that shortly after the decree of Pope Boniface VIII., which struck so severe a blow at dissection, the Venetian Senate passed a decree ordaining that a dissection of the human body should be made every year in the city of Venice, and he leaves his readers to conclude that this effectually proves that dissection had not really been discouraged by the Pope. The very opposite conclusion would be deduced by anyone familiar with the relations between the Republic of Venice and the Papacy. These two powers were always struggling against each other; again and again the Venetian Republic, in maintaining its rights, braved the Papal interdicts. The fact that it allowed dissections, so far from proving that the Pope allowed them, would seem to prove that in this case, and in so many other cases, and especially that of [{88}] Vesalius of Padua, the Venetian Senate sought to show the Vatican that it would yield none of its rights to clerical control. This very fact--that Venice refused to be bound with regard to anatomical investigation by an order from the Vatican--seems to be entirely in the line with all the other facts in the case, which show that the Roman court had committed itself, most unfortunately, against the main means of progress in anatomy and medicine."
Here then is the answer that a modern historian and educator makes to all the representations with regard to the development of anatomy and the practice of dissection during the Middle Ages. If the practice of dissection was permitted it was in spite of the Popes. The fact that there were a dozen of medical schools in Italy at which dissection was carried on is ignored. The great anatomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries simply did not exist--Dr. White knows nothing about them. There must be no admission that the Popes permitted dissection or any other form of science. Dr. White makes his last stand by a really marvelous tour d'esprit. It was Venice defying the Vatican that permitted dissection. This, he supposes, may help him, for anatomy did develop very wonderfully at Padua when it was Venetian territory. But, as pointed out by Roth, dissection was practiced very successfully, and the anatomical tradition established at Padua, before it came under the dominion of Venice. At all the other important cities of Italy dissection was carried on. We have given some of the evidence for Verona, for Pisa, for Naples, for Bologna, for Florence, and, be it remembered, even for Rome. Padua was the rival of Bologna in anatomy only for a comparatively short time. Bologna [{89}] always maintained a primacy in the field of anatomy, and never more so than after she became a Papal city at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Vesalius taught and demonstrated not at Padua alone, but also at Bologna and at Pisa. For two centuries Rome was the most successful rival of Bologna, and hundreds of dissections were done in the Papal Medical School.
Of course, the appeal to Venetian opposition to the Papacy as an explanation for dissection being carried on in Italy in spite of ecclesiastical regulations to the contrary is only a subterfuge. It can only be found in histories written by those who refuse to see facts as they were, because those facts do not accord with pet theories as to Papal Opposition to Science, and the Warfare Between Theology and Science, which must be maintained at all costs, though with an air of apology always for having to tell such unpleasant truths of these old-time religious authorities.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANATOMY
VESALIUS.
The Golden Age of discovery in anatomy culminated during the first half of the sixteenth century. This will not be surprising if it is but recalled that this period represents the culmination also of that larger golden age of achievement in art and letters, which has been called the Renaissance. Columbus and Copernicus were giving men a new world and a new universe. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Lionardo da Vinci, the Bellinis and Titian were creating a new world of art. Most of these artists were deeply interested in anatomy. Every phase of human thought was being born anew. Unfortunately, this word Renaissance has given rise to many misunderstandings. Many people have taken its significance of re-birth to mean that art and letters, and with them education and thinking, were born again into the modern world at this time with the coming in of the New Learning, just as if there had been nothing worth while talking about in these lines of human accomplishment in the preceding centuries. Taken in this sense, the word Renaissance is entirely a misnomer. Magnificent achievements in art and letters and every form of education preceded the Renaissance by at least three or four centuries. The Gothic cathedrals and the enduring artistic development that took place in their making, the magnificent organization of technical education in the training of artist artisans by the guilds of the time (we would be glad if our technical schools could accomplish [{91}] anything like the same results, for evidently, though the name technical education is our invention, these medieval peoples had the reality to a high degree), and finally the universities, which have remained essentially the same down to our own day--all these serve to show how much was done for every form of education many centuries before the beginning of the Renaissance so-called.
It is not surprising that with this much of education abroad in the land men succeeded in making enduring literature in every form and in every country in Europe, and in setting examples of style in prose and verse that succeeding generations have nearly always gone back to admire lovingly. Such an amount of education and development of thinking could not have come without profound attention to science, and, as a matter of fact, there was much more anticipation of even what is most modern in our scientific thinking than most scholars seem to have any idea of. Personally, I have found, in writing the history of The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, more that interested me in the science of this century than in almost any other department of its wonderful educational development.
We have already seen that while anatomy had during preceding centuries only the beginning of the development that it was destined to reach during the sixteenth century, it would be a serious mistake to think that the study of anatomy, having died in the old classical days, was not re-born until the sixteenth century. This would be to commit the error that many ardent devotees of the Renaissance make with regard to all the accomplishments of this period. In spite of the contrary almost universal impression, the Renaissance was not original [{92}] to any marked degree. With the touch of the Greek spirit that had come again into the world, it only carried the preceding work of great original thinkers to a high order of perfection. This happened as well in anatomy as in art and architecture and literature. Anatomical science was a lusty infant of great promise when Vesalius, the Father of Anatomy, came on the scene. The great painters, Raphael and Lionardo and Michael Angelo, owed much to Giotto and Fra Angelico, who had preceded them, but not more than Vesalius and his contemporaries, who did such magnificent work in original anatomical investigation, owed to Mondino, Bertrucci, Zerbi, Achillini, and above all to Berengar of Carpi and Benivieni, who did their work before and just after the sixteenth century opened. There is never a sudden development in the history of any department of man's knowledge or achievement, as there is nothing absolutely new under the sun, though it is still the custom of the young man in his graduation essay to talk of such things, and older men sometimes fail to realize the truth that in history as in biology, life always comes from preceding life--omne vivum ex vivo--and there is no such thing as spontaneous generation.