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  • La fabbrica del corpo: Libri e dissezione nel Rinascimento
  • Paula Findlen
Andrea Carlino. La fabbrica del corpo: Libri e dissezione nel Rinascimento. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, no. 622. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1994. 267 pp. Ill. L 40,000 (paperbound).

The history of anatomy has long been considered one of the central subjects within the history of Western medicine. Yet it has often served as background to other topics—for example, the work of great physicians such as Vesalius and Harvey—rather than being the subject itself. Andrea Carlino’s La fabbrica del corpo explores the interactions between bodies and texts in the world of late medieval and Renaissance anatomy. In this ambitious and thought-provoking book, Carlino traces the emergence of anatomy from the ancient writings of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and Celsus, to the medieval Islamic commentaries and anatomies, and finally to the world of sixteenth-century Italy in which Vesalius and his followers made anatomy an important academic discipline. He is concerned with the cultural climate in which anatomy emerged as an acceptable part of the training of physicians, prior to its demonstrable necessity for the type of clinical medicine that they practiced.

Carlino divides his book into three thematic sections: representations (the images of anatomy), practices (the activities surrounding anatomies), and traditions (the textual traces of anatomical knowledge and the development of its moral significance). A final section brings together these earlier comments by discussing the characteristics of Renaissance anatomy—from the published editions of Galen, to Berengario da Carpo’s commentary on Galen, and finally to the [End Page 706] work of such anatomists as Vesalius and Realdo Colombo. The first section offers a deft iconographic reading of the imagined scene of the anatomy, in which lecturers, demonstrators, dissectors, books, and students appear in a variety of combinations, each indicating a new image for anatomy with the emergence of the printed book. As Carlino suggests, images (like texts) seem to precede practice. In these books, Renaissance writers, editors, and engravers visualized and publicized the medieval (quodlibetal) culture of anatomy.

The second chapter of Carlino’s book draws upon the archives of the sixteenth-century Roman confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato in order to write a history of anatomy from the perspective of the cadaver. In this fascinating research, Carlino concretely demonstrates the ritualized nature of sixteenth-century anatomies, from the selection of potential cadavers to their burial. The dissected were primarily unknown and ignoble—non-Romans, non-Christians, and perpetrators of infamous crimes that demanded corporeal retribution in their punishment (making anatomy at times equivalent to an executioner’s disemboweling). Dissector and dissected participated in a situation of mutual risk, making the rituals surrounding burial just as important to the moral redemption of the living as to that of the dead. From this perspective, Carlino interprets the proscriptions surrounding dissection as more cultural and anthropological in nature than strictly religious.

The waning of such penitential preoccupations by the 1570s signaled the arrival of anatomy as a morally acceptable activity for medical professors and students. Yet Carlino discerns a lingering unease in the language of anatomy throughout the early modern period. Through a close reading of anatomical texts from antiquity through the Renaissance, he traces two interwoven threads in his third chapter: the continuous though marginal performance of anatomies from the third century b.c. through the twelfth century, and the growing associations between anatomists and butchers (as members of sordid, cruel, and even impious professions). The overcoming of this sense of status pollution was essential to the establishment of the anatomist as an authoritative medical figure in the tradition of Vesalius.

Carlino’s provocative and learned assessment of the tradition of anatomy will surely engender a lively debate among historians of medicine regarding the reasons for the revitalization of an old scientific technique to teach an even more ancient art. The fact that demonstrating on bodies preceded new texts about the human body, leading both Vesalius and his opponents to use the same material evidence to confute each other, suggests that the “rise of anatomy” concerned much more than seeing. Rather, it was the act of speaking, reading, and performing around the human body that characterized...

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