This 1905 article about early anatomists drops some very interesting names, such as Madonna Manzolina and Dr. John Shippen. Both are worth further study.
Early Anatomists
Dissection was Practiced in Egypt in 300 B.C.
Dr. William Williams Keen tells some interesting facts regarding the early history of dissection. The first human anatomists were in Alexandria three centuries before Christ, and they and their successors for 2,000 years were commonly reported to have indulged in antemortem dissection.
Says Dr. Keen: “Vesalius was shipwrecked and died while fleeing for his life on such a charge. The Edinburgh act of 1505, giving surgeons the body of one criminal annually ‘to make an anatomy of,’ was guarded by the proviso ‘after he be dead.’ Even poetry has lent its aid to perpetuate the legend of the ‘invisible girl,’ whose ghost was believed to haunt Sir Charles Bell’s anatomical rooms, where she had been dissected alive on the night preceding that appointed for her marriage.”
For a long time Alexandria was the only medical center of the world, and the physician Galen (born about 130 A.D.) had to journey from Rome to the African city even to see a skeleton. He sent his students to the German battlefields to dissect the bodies of the national enemies, while he himself used apes as most resembling human beings. Human dissection was revived in Bologna in the fourteenth century, where Madonna Manzolina later was professor of anatomy, undoubtedly one of the first women doctors, if not the very first. Leonardo da Vinci, painter of “The Last Supper,” was a great anatomist, but dissection had fallen into disuse when Vesalius finally revived it about the middle of the sixteenth century.
Even in comparatively modern times anatomists have been the objects of attacks by the populace. In 1765 Dr. John Shippen of Philadelphia was mobbed as a grave robber. Doctors’ riots in New York occurred 23 years later and were due to the belief that the medical students robbed graves continually. It was the lack of opportunity that led to the practice of grave robbing and originated what Dr. Keen calls “a set of the lowest possible villains – the resurrectionists.”
Source: Bismarck daily tribune. (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]), 25 Aug. 1905.
