The Popes and Science. James Joseph Walsh
from these instances from different nations, was becoming so widespread as to constitute a serious source of danger to health, and might easily have furnished occasion for the conveyance of disease. It is almost needless to say to our generation that it was eminently unhygienic. Any modern authority in sanitation would at once declare against it, and the custom would be put an end to without more ado. There can be no doubt at all then that Pope Boniface VIII. accomplished good, not evil, by the publication of this bull. So anyone with modern views as to the danger of disease from the foolish custom which it abolished would at once have declared, and yet, by a perversion of its signification, it came to be connected with a supposed prohibition of dissection. For this misunderstanding Pope Boniface VIII. has had to suffer all sorts of reproaches and the Church has been branded as opposed to anatomy by historians(!)
Is it possible, however, that this bull was misinterpreted so as to forbid dissection, or at least certain forms of anatomical preparation which were useful for the study and teaching of anatomy? That is what Dr. White asserts. He shows, moreover, in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, that he knew that the document in question was perfectly inoffensive as regards any prohibition of dissection in itself, but insists that by a misinterpretation, easy to understand as he considers, because of the supposed opposition of ecclesiastics to medical science, it did actually prevent anatomical development. President White says: "As to the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII., the usual statement is that it forbade all dissections. While it was undoubtedly construed universally to prohibit dissection for anatomical purposes, its declared intent was as stated in the text; that it was constantly construed against anatomical investigations cannot for a moment be denied."
If a misinterpretation were subsequently made, surely Pope Boniface VIII. must not be held responsible for it; yet in spite of the fact that Dr. White shows that he knew very well that this bull did not forbid the practice of dissection, he does not hesitate to use over and over again expressions which would imply that some formal decision against dissection itself had been made, though this is the only Papal document he refers to. He even goes so far as to say that "anatomical investigation was made a sin against the Holy Ghost." He frequently repeats that for three centuries after the issuance of this bull the development of anatomy was delayed and hampered, and insists that only that Vesalius at great personal risk broke through this Church opposition, modern anatomy would never have developed. He proceeds constantly on the theory that it was always this bull that was in fault, though he confesses that if so, it was by a misunderstanding; and the only fault he can find to attribute to the Pope is a lack of infallibility, as he calls it, because he was not able to foresee that his bull would be so misunderstood.
I suppose we are to understand from this that Dr. White considers that he knows the meaning of the word infallibility. It is not a hard word to understand if one wishes to understand it. The meaning that he gives it in this passage is so entirely different from its accepted meaning among Catholics, that any schoolboy in any of our parochial schools would tell him that the word was never used by Catholics in the sense in which he here employs it. It is so misunderstood popularly outside of the Church, and this Dr. White doubtless knew very well. When a man uses a term in medicine in a different sense to that which is ordinarily accepted, we consider him ignorant; but when he deliberately uses it in another sense for his own purposes because of a false significance attached to it in the popular mind, we have a special name for him.
The whole matter, however, resolves itself into the simple question, "Was dissection prevented and anatomical investigation hampered after the issuance of the bull?" This is entirely a question of fact. The history of anatomy will show whether dissection ceased or not at this time. Now if those who so confidently make assertions in this matter had ever gone to a genuine history of anatomy, they would have learned at once that, far from this being the time when dissection ceased, the year 1300 is almost exactly the date for which we have the first definite evidence of the making of dissections and the gradual development of anatomical investigation by this means in connection with the Italian universities. This is such a curious coincidence that I always call it to the attention of medical students in lecturing on this subject.
The first dissection of which we have definite record, Roth tells us in his life of Vesalius, was a so-called private anatomy or dissection made for medico-legal purposes. Its date is the year 1302, within two years after the bull. A nobleman had died and there was a suspicion that he had been poisoned. The judge ordered that an autopsy be made in order to determine this question. Unfortunately we do not know what the decision of the doctors in the case was. We know only that the case was referred to them. Now it seems very clear that if this had not been a common practice before, the court would not have adopted this measure, apparently as a matter of judicial routine, as seems to have been the case in this instance. Had it been the first time that it was done instead of having the record of the transaction preserved only by chance, any mention of it at all would have appeared so striking to the narrator, that he would have been careful to tell the whole story, and especially the decision reached in the matter.
After this, evidence of dissection accumulates rapidly. During the second decade of the century Mondino, the first writer on anatomy, was working at Bologna. We have the records of his having made some dissections in connection with his university teaching there, and eventually he published a text-book on dissection which became the guide for dissectors for the next two centuries. Within five years after this we have a story of students being haled to court for body-snatching for anatomical purposes, and about this time there was, according to Rashdall in his History of the Universities, a statute of the University of Bologna which required the teacher in anatomy to dissect a body, if the students brought it to him. More than ten years earlier than this, that is, within ten years after the supposed Papal prohibition, there are records of dissections having been made at Venice in public, for the benefit of the doctors of the city, at the expense of the municipal treasury. During the first half of this century money was allowed at Bologna for wine, to be given to those who attended the public dissections, and if we recall the state in which the bodies must have been at a time when the use of preservatives was unknown, we can well understand the need for it. All this shows, as I have said, that the date of Boniface's bull (1300), far from representing the eclipse of anatomy, actually fixes the date of the dawn of modern practical anatomical study.
The most interesting question in this whole discussion is as to how much dissection Mondino actually did during the second decade of the fourteenth century. His book became the manual of dissection that was in practically every dissector's hands for several centuries after. Probably no book of its kind has ever been more used, and none maintained its place as the standard work in this department for so long. No less than 25 printed editions of it appeared altogether. It would seem to be utterly improbable that the author of a text-book of this kind could have made only a few dissections. There are a number of historians who have claimed, nevertheless, that at most he did not dissect more than three or four bodies. This is all that we have absolute evidence for, that is to say, only these dissections are recorded. It is easy to understand, however, that a professor of anatomy might make even hundreds of dissections, and yet have something to say only about a very few which happened to present some special peculiarities. The absence of further records may readily be accounted for also in other ways. The art of printing was not yet invented; paper had only just been discovered and was extremely expensive, and many factors conspired to destroy any records that may have been made.
Outsiders dipping into the history of medicine have made much of our paucity of documentary evidence with regard to what Mondino actually did, and have, when it suited their purpose, insisted that this first author of a dissector's manual did but the three or four dissections explicitly mentioned. Those who are more familiar with the history of medicine, and especially of anatomy, are persuaded that he must have done many. In the first class of writers is Prof. White, for instance, who declares positively that Mondino did not dissect more bodies than those of which we have absolute records. According to his emphatically expressed opinion, the reason why the father of dissection did not dissect more was because of ecclesiastical opposition. Even these few dissections were due to some favoring chance or the laxity of the ecclesiastical authorities, or Mondino might have paid dear for his audacity. No one else, according to Prof. White, dared to encounter the awful penalties that might have been inflicted on Mondino until Vesalius, more than two centuries later, broke through "the ecclesiastical barrier" and gave liberty