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BODYCAST - THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE CSOT INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS A morbid cottage industry sprung up around the corpse-crazy anatomists of yesteryear By Jackie Rosnehec Reprinted with permission from Doctor’s Review, May 2005. Once upon a time, nobody willed their earthly remains to science. Moral and legal roadblocks surround the issue even today, so back when Greece was the centre of the medical universe, physicians found it nearly impossible to get their hands on hands – and feet and spleens and brains and all the other parts they needed as both study and teaching tools. In Victorian times, too, throughout Europe and North America , the human form was considered sacrosanct, and everyone from the castle-dwelling aristocrat to the beggar who died in the street was afforded a proper burial, regardless of their ability to pay. Unfortunately, this left the scientific community in a bit of a pickle. Though advances in medical research were coming in leaps and bounds during the nineteenth century, anatomists, physiologists and pathologists faced a constant struggle against church and state in their quest for knowledge. Necropsies- the slicing and dicing of cats and dogs – were one thing, but the public still wasn’t ready to see the same fate befall a human being. Autopsies, when permitted, were limited to cases of foul play. And so, the anatomical and functional aspects of disease remained mysteriously elusive; the more macabre elements of human anatomy were considered anathema to God and country. In Ancient Greece , Herophilus (c. 225-280 BC), by all accounts the Father of Anatomy, was the first to perform public dissections on human corpses for his students. He described all the major organs, as well as the nervous system, in which he further distinguished sensory and motor pathways. His contemporary, Erasistratus (c. 304-250 BC), focused on cardiac function; he traced the veins and arteries to the heart, and identified and named the tricuspid valve. The bodies they examined to gain these startling new insights were likely stolen, since dissection was illegal. Soon, however, the forward-thinking Greek public concluded that any moral problems were trumped by the good that could come of it. This moral vision prevailed – until the Catholic Church came along. With the rise of the Church, all forms of bodily desecration were once again declared off limits. Not only were autopsies and dissections illegal, but so were surgeries on living persons. It was the sort of thinking that had Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo cutting up cadavers in secret, and surgeries of any kind relegated to the domain of the lowly barber. With the Enlightenment, however, thinking once again took hold throughout Europe . Surgery slowly established itself as a noble profession. Strangely, those who wanted to cut up people who were already dead remained on the fringes, challenging society’s comfort level at every turn. This abstract is a portion of the article
which appears in the Fall 2005 issue of BodyCast.
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