[127] Plate XXIX: a post-mortem scene in the late fourteenth century, from a French MS. of the Grande Chirurgie of Guy de Chauliac, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier, MS. 184 français, folio 14 recto. The scene is laid in the bedroom of the deceased. In the left-hand top corner is the bed, by the side of which a female figure, partly obliterated, is praying. Below and to the left are two other female figures, and a man richly dressed in an ermine-trimmed robe. These are presumably the relatives of the dead. The corpse, that of a woman, has been placed on a bare table and is opened from the larynx to the symphysis pubis. In front stands a lad holding a round wooden vessel for the reception of the viscera, and farther to the right is a stool on which are placed two or three instruments. The physician, in full canonicals, is at the extreme right of the picture. The actual process of examination is being made by three of his assistants. To the left the first of these deepens, with a knife, the incision that has already been made over the sternum, the second is grasping with his two hands and rolling up the great omentum so as to display the viscera beneath, and the third holds a wand in his right hand, with which he points to the abdomen, while in his left he carries a book. Five others throng into the room from a passage which opens into it.
[128] Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis, Florence, 1506. In the description of Case 32, Benivieni expresses surprise at having been refused permission to perform a post-mortem examination, as though it were unusual for him to meet rebuffs of the kind. ‘Experimento comprobare volentes, corpus incidere tentavimus sed nescio qua superstitione negantibus cognatis, voti compotes fieri nequivimus.’
[129] See E. Nicaise, La Grande Chirurgie de Guy de Chauliac, p. 30, Paris, 1890.
[130] ‘Ut Anatomici explicationem ipsius Mundini sequantur’, Francesco Maria Colle, Storia scientifico-letteraria dello Studio di Padova, 4 vols., Padua, 1824–5, vol. iii, p. 108.
[131] Martin von Mellerstadt, also called Pollich or Polich.
[132] Plate XXX a, from a late fifteenth-century Provençal translation of the Grande Chirurgie of Guy de Chauliac. Vatican Library, MS. hispanice 4804, folio 8 recto. A professor and pupil are examining a wasted corpse placed on a trestle in the open air. The teacher is pointing out the surface markings.
[133] Plate XXX b, from the French Guy de Chauliac MS. in the Bristol Reference Library, folio 25 recto. The MS. dates from between the years 1420 and 1435; cp. Norris Mathews, Early Printed Books and MSS. in the Bristol Reference Library, Bristol, 1899, p. 70; J. A. Nixon, ‘A New Guy de Chauliac MS.’, in Transactions of the XVIIth Internal. Cong. of Med., Sect. of Hist. of Med., London, 1914, p. 419; and Charles Singer, ‘The Figures of the Bristol Guy de Chauliac MS. circa 1430’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of the History of Medicine, 1917, vol. x, pp. 71–91. The figure shows a professor and pupil. The former is demonstrating the bones of a skeleton.
[134] The number of female criminals being less than the number of male criminals, Ludovico Frati states (La vita privata di Bologna dal secolo XIII al XVII, Bologna, 1900, pp. 116–18) that only two anatomies in all were held each year, and thirty students admitted to the female and twenty to the male dissection. This would mean far less than two dissections a year for each student of over two years’ standing.
[135] The anatomical works of Leonardo have now been rendered accessible in Tredici Foglie delta Royal Library di Windsor. Leonardo da Vinci, Quaderni d’anatomia ... Pubblicati da O. C. L. Vangensten, A. Fonahm, H. Hopstock, Christiania, 1911, &c.
[136] Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio only studied surface anatomy, so far as is known. For a summary of the anatomical work of these painters see M. Duval and E. Cuyer, Histoire de l’Anatomie plastique, p. 20, Paris, 1898.