Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley
of what could be natural for this specific body. That is, canonization officials expected physicians to draw on both empirical and theoretical medical knowledge to speak both about human bodies in general and a specific corpse in particular.
The reason for the Church’s new expectations for their physiciantestators was based on ongoing changes in how knowledge was made in medicine in the early modern period. Although still rooted in classical medical authorities such as Galen and Hippocrates, medicine by the early sixteenth century was undergoing what has been termed a “Renaissance” in its understanding of the human body.46 This was fueled by the increasing availability of old texts and a circulation of some newly discovered texts from the ancient world.47
During the sixteenth century, medicine increasingly emphasized firsthand experience of anatomy as a guide to understanding the human body. Traditionally considered a low form of knowledge making, one typically relegated to nonphysician practitioners, direct observation as a guide to practice was beginning to be recognized as more important for the medical profession. New works in fact circulated that sought to share such information widely—a clear indication of its value for the profession.48 By the early sixteenth century, then, a few physicians, including Alessandro Benedetti, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and Niccolò Massa, had conducted autopsies with their own hands as a way of uncovering new knowledge about the workings of human anatomy.49
Real change in attitudes toward dissection is evident in the 1543 publication of Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body. Despite his reliance on Galen in some respects, Vesalius also argued forcefully for the utility of firsthand knowledge of dissection.50 Indeed, Vesalius represented a fusion of knowledge-making techniques, since he employed the empirical methods characteristic of surgeons and apothecaries as well as using classical texts as sources with which to make knowledge about the human body.51 A number of anatomists, including Realdo Colombo and Charles Estienne, also engaged in this synthesis of empirical and learned practices and added their own arguments about the structure of the human body based on these methods.52 By the seventeenth century, Vesalian methods of dissection, according to historian Roy Porter, “had become the golden method for anatomical investigation.”53 This perhaps overstates the case, however, as students at even the best medical schools still might have had irregular access to actual dissections and many practitioners remained unconvinced by the new methods.54
Nevertheless, the power of Vesalian techniques is amply demonstrated by the number of landmark anatomical studies that were produced around the year 1600. Such publications documented for the first time the valves in human veins, the mechanisms of digestion, the structure of female reproductive anatomy, and, finally, the circulation of blood.55 Many physicians had now embraced an epistemology that fused empirical investigation with textual evidence as a way to understand the human body.
In sum, when the Church turned to physicians to conduct postmortems on holy individuals, it both drew on existing legal, funerary, and medical precedents relating to autopsies and embraced new trends about how medical professionals made knowledge about the human body. The following sections detail how this collaboration between medicine and religion developed over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
THE FIRST ATTEMPTS: IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA AND CARLO BORROMEO
The postmortems performed on Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556) and Carlo Borromeo (d. 1584) represent the first documented post-Reformation attempts to use anatomy to establish sanctity.56 In each case, the examination occurred shortly after the holy man’s death, and embalming was the initial reason for opening the corpse.57 The embalming of elites had been routine since the late Middle Ages and was not unusual in these cases.58 However, upon opening each corpse, the medical practitioners and other spectators involved discovered unusual anatomy. This anatomy then became the focal point of the postmortem. But the significance attached to the anatomy was not fixed: physicians, eager to promote their careers, saw in the bodies of saints the possibility of extending and illustrating their range of medical knowledge. In contrast, hagiographers who wrote about these postmortems sought to use anatomy as evidence of the divine. Each group engaged in the emerging genre of using direct observation to make knowledge so as to further a specific aim.59 But the fact that the same anatomical details could be interpreted very differently demonstrates that the meaning of bodily evidence was unstable and subjective. This instability meant that the negotiations about the significance of specific anatomical irregularities led to the exclusion of this evidence from the list of miracles for each of these two saints.
The autopsy of Ignatius of Loyola, occurring shortly after his death in 1556, demonstrates clearly the different meanings and uses of holy anatomy in the mid-sixteenth century. Owing to his prominence as the founder of the Jesuit order, Loyola was opened by the most eminent physician currently residing in Rome, Realdo Colombo (1515–1559), the professor of anatomy at the University of Rome La Sapienza.60 The declared reason for opening Loyola’s body was an embalming effort requested by the Jesuits.61 There may also have been forensic motivation, as Loyola’s final ailment had not been considered life-threatening by his physicians.62 Still, the autopsy was not initially expected to confirm any signs of sanctity. It was only because Colombo found such unusual anatomy inside the deceased Jesuit that he thought it worthy of documentation.
Colombo recounted the details of Loyola’s postmortem in his anatomical manual De re anatomica, published in 1559 as part of a narrative that emphasized his own expertise. In fact, the entire text of Colombo’s De re anatomica was intended to promote its author’s reputation and, to some extent, attack Vesalius, whom Colombo viewed as a rival.63 Throughout the text, Colombo based his authority in part on the immense experience that he had with dissection and autopsy.64 The section in which Loyola’s autopsy appears, in particular, seems to have been designed to demonstrate Colombo’s superior skill and knowledge as an anatomist. This section purports to treat “those things which are rarely found in anatomy.”65 Colombo emphasizes, though, that such rarities were in some ways not new to him: “I, however, from the beginning of my career have dissected innumerous bodies, and in the last fifteen years I have dissected an even greater number in the center of the well-attended academies of Pavia, Pisa, and Rome.”66 In addition, Colombo notes that he sometimes “dissected fourteen bodies in a year” and that “no type of body has been denied to me for dissection, except for a man who was mute from birth.”67 Thus, this section served to underline Colombo’s skill and demonstrate that he had more knowledge of human anatomy than his contemporaries or than even the classical authorities on anatomy.
Colombo suggests in this section that he undertook a great many private autopsies, which added to his knowledge of human anatomy. As two editors of his work note, it would be difficult for a modern pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies a year to see all the abnormalities that Colombo had observed, let alone a sixteenth-century practitioner who should have at most been opening a few dozen.68 Cynthia Klestinec has argued that private, explorative autopsies were much more common and were considered surer ways of gaining knowledge of the human body than had previously been thought for early modern Europe.69 By highlighting the extreme diversity that he had seen in human bodies, Colombo was suggesting to knowledgeable readers that he had opened far more bodies than would have been officially allowed. This would, in turn, imply that he had greater knowledge of the human body and accuracy in describing it than his competitors who did not go to such lengths. The postmortem on Loyola, which appeared in this section, was therefore part of a statement about Colombo’s extensive knowledge acquired through firsthand investigation.
Colombo’s narrative of Loyola’s postmortem clearly emphasized his personal experience with anatomy and his extensive knowledge of the human body. He made it clear that he, rather than a surgeon or barber, opened the body and handled Loyola’s entrails, stating that he “extracted with these hands innumerable stones from his penis and found stones of various colors in his lungs, liver, and in the vena porta.… I saw moreover pebbles in the urinary duct in the bladder, in the colon, in the hemorrhoidal vein and in his navel area.”70 Although these were unusual details, Colombo stated he had seen other bodies with similar