Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (review)

Roger French. Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999. ix + 289 pp. Ill. $86.95.

For almost forty years, Roger French's contributions to the study of medical history have been many, considerable, and wide-ranging. His academic work began in his undergraduate years at St. Catherine's Oxford, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1965. After holding various lectureships, in 1975 he achieved the virtually impossible: an Oxford man, he crossed the enormous chasm between the great ancient British universities when he was called as director of the Well-come Unit for the History of Medicine in Cambridge. Subsequently, even after assuming heavy administrative duties, he has continued to publish prodigiously.

Thus, French has considered a variety of topics in his many publications. In general, however, his interests have focused mainly on the development and interplay of medical theory and practice from antiquity through early modern times. A central theme in several of his writings is the influence of academic medicine on the findings that later commentators have held to be at least novel, and at most revolutionary. In his study of the intellectual history of William Harvey's discovery and demonstration of the circulation of the blood (William Harvey's Natural Philosophy, 1994), for example, he argued that Harvey's findings grew from the matrix afforded him by academic medicine. French maintains that the use of experiment, demonstration, mathematics, and mechanics that Harvey so effectively marshaled in his De motu cordis grew naturally from the "New Philosophy" of which medicine was a vital component.

French returns to his general theme in this present work while presenting an interesting and admittedly personal view of an important and controversial subject: the genesis and development of public dissection in Western Europe. His goals are to discover why medical investigators of the European Middle Ages and early modern times gave human dissection an essential role in medical training; to ascertain its purpose in that training; and to explore the cultural and social mores that made it possible.

In his pursuit of these topics, French leads us into numerous fascinating paths. Some but not all of these are central to his thesis. The reader should be ever mindful of French's cautionary statement in his preface that this book is not a history of anatomy, but a selected inquiry into certain questions that intrigue him. Most interesting to me was the urban rivalry that French sketches in chapter 3 between two pre-Vesalian anatomists who are pitted against each other as protagonists in a battle of the books. He maintains that Gabriele Zerbi and Berengario da Carpi, whom he has considered elsewhere in different contexts, ¹ engaged in a literary competition, designing their anatomical compositions to promote their respective cities and their universities through the "business" of anatomy. Thus one of Zerbi's prime motives in creating his enormous textbook, French argues, was to exalt the Paduan studium, while Berengario strove in his huge commentary on his Bolognese predecessor, Mondino, to demonstrate to the world the continuing superiority of dissection as both a public and pedagogical practice in Bologna.

Although this is an intensely personal, idiosyncratic book, many of whose eccentricities can and should be overlooked, some cannot. Despite its many merits, French's work, in the words of the romantic poet laureate, seems "suckled in a creed outworn." By presenting a dated view, it ignores much important scholarly effort of the past half-century. Even its title reflects this antiquated position: only art historians still use the term "Renaissance" to refer to the era of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

French's references are often obsolete or inaccurate. Citing a work published fifty years ago to validate his statement that "Arabs did not dissect or draw pictures of the human body" (p. 1, and p. 3 n. 7, where he cites Cyril Elgood, A Medical History of Persia...