be incredible. Be that as it may, it
is undeniable that at the beginning of the fourteenth century the
idea of dissecting the human body was not a novel one; {42} the
importance of a knowledge of the intimate structure of the body had
already been appreciated by divers ruling bodies, and specific
regulations prescribing its practice had been enacted. It is more
reasonable to believe that in the era preceding immediately that of
Mondino, human bodies were being opened and after a fashion
anatomized. All that we know of the work of Mondino suggests that it
was not a new enterprise in which he was a pioneer, but rather that
he brought to an old practice a new enthusiasm and better methods,
which, caught on the rising wave of interest in medical teaching at
Bologna, and preserved by his own energy as a writer in the first
original systematic treatise written since the time of Galen,
created for him in subsequent uncritical times the reputation of
being the restorer of the practice of anatomizing the human body,
the first one to demonstrate and teach such knowledge since the time
of the Ptolemaic anatomists, Erasistratus and Herophilus."

In order to show that Mondino did not perform only the two or three
dissections which he himself for special reasons mentions, but many
more, Professor Pilcher has made a series of quotations from the
Bolognese anatomist's manual of dissection. It is after all quite easy
to understand that if dissections were common, there would be no
records of most of them, as they would be too commonplace for
chroniclers to mention. Only those that have some special feature are
by chance mentioned in some accounts of doings at the university. The
records of the actual number of dissections at most medical schools,
even a century ago, are not now available in most cases. On the other
hand, no one can read these quotations from Mondino's book without
realizing that the man who wrote these passages had made many {43}
dissections, and that it was a common practice for him to make
anatomical preparations in many different ways, under many different
circumstances and for many different purposes.

The second quotation shows, in fact, that Mondino had the custom
sometimes of boiling his bodies before dissecting them when he wished
to demonstrate special features, and he promises to make such an
anatomy for his students at another time. If the bull of Pope Boniface
VIII. was mi