Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (review)

Andrea Carlino. Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv, 266 pp. $29.

This English edition of Fabbrica del corpo (1994) is most welcome. Andrea Carlino has produced a fascinating study of the consequences of the classical tradition of anatomy for developments within Renaissance medicine. He begins the book with a fundamental question: Why did it take to the sixteenth century for the space of the word (theory) and the space of dissecting (practice) to be replaced by the single image of the teacher dissecting the cadaver? Carlino identifies this moment as occurring with the publication of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543). In attempting to get to the roots of this issue, Carlino takes an interdisciplinary approach. The first chapter contains a detailed analysis of seven pictorial representations of Mondino’s anatomy lesson that appeared in print from 1493 to 1535. The author describes these as following a quodlibetarian model, or, in other words, one where the theory and the practice of anatomy are kept separate. He then juxtaposes them to the famous frontispiece of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica and argues that here we see a new use of the book and the cadaver in anatomy. Intriguingly, Carlino then turns to giving a history of one of the two protagonists in this new anatomy lesson, namely, that of the dissected bodies.

From a close reading of the records of the College of Physicians, local officials, and various confraternities in sixteenth-century Rome, Carlino delineates the culturally significant considerations regarding who was publicly dissected, where they came from, what their crime was, the mode of their execution, and what happened to their remains after dissection. He argues that the records show that there is a decreasing preoccupation with the fate of the deceased in the afterlife and, notably, he was unable to find any documentary evidence after 1573 of funerary processions or special burials of the dissected. Throughout the text Carlino makes the case that a tenacious association between dissection and the condemned has marked the entire history of western anatomy from Herophilus to Vesalius. He traces the arguments made by classical and medieval authors for using anatomical knowledge in healing and their qualms over the practice of dissecting. In doing so, Carlino draws attention to the continuity between ancient and modern arguments regarding the damage to the character which results from dissecting the human body.

In the last two chapters, Carlino first turns to a consideration of why dissection became established as a practice at the University of Bologna in 1315 and then elsewhere in Europe. He asks why did it took to 1543 and Vesalius for the development of the sequence of looking inside a body to distinguish its parts and then to describe them in some sort of writing. The former is explained by the circulation of authoritative Greek and Arab texts, the development of university teaching, and the use of autopsy. To answer the latter, Carlino makes the argument that the association of human dissection with filth led to two interdependent premises on which dissection was inhibited, the anthropological-religious one and the epistemological-historical one. Here, Carlino’s arguments are on a continuum with those made by Roger French and Katherine Stuart in recent books on dissection and vivisection during the Renaissance and the dishonorable status of executioners in sixteenth-century Augsburg.

As Carlino concludes, dissection is never an innocent act. Its practice requires two things to emerge. The first is a legitimizing institutional and epistemological context and the second is the construction of rituals and mechanisms to minimize the transgressive and sacrilegious connotations of contact with the dead, blood, and the desecration of the human body. In Books of the Body Carlino has proven that this was indeed the case...