ll prevented dissection, but even
insists on what cannot but seem utterly absurd to any one who has read
even the brief account I have given here, that except at one or two
places, and then only to a very limited degree, dissection was not
practiced at all. Here is how the history of dissection must be viewed
according to Dr. White:--

"But Dr. Walsh elsewhere falls back on the fact that shortly after
the decree of Pope Boniface VIII., which struck so severe a blow at
dissection, the Venetian Senate passed a decree ordaining that a
dissection of the human body should be made every year in the city
of Venice, and he leaves his readers to conclude that this
effectually proves that dissection had not really been discouraged
by the Pope. The very opposite conclusion would be deduced by anyone
familiar with the relations between the Republic of Venice and the
Papacy. These two powers were always struggling against each other;
again and again the Venetian Republic, in maintaining its rights,
braved the Papal interdicts. The fact that it allowed dissections,
so far from proving that the Pope allowed them, would seem to prove
that in this case, and in so many other cases, and especially that
of {88} Vesalius of Padua, the Venetian Senate sought to show the
Vatican that it would yield none of its rights to clerical control.
This very fact--that Venice refused to be bound with regard to
anatomical investigation by an order from the Vatican--seems to be
entirely in the line with all the other facts in the case, which
show that the Roman court had committed itself, most unfortunately,
against the main means of progress in anatomy and medicine."

Here then is the answer that a modern historian and educator makes to
all the representations with regard to the development of anatomy and
the practice of dissection during the Middle Ages. If the practice of
dissection was permitted it was in spite of the Popes. The fact that
there were a dozen of medical schools in Italy at which dissection was
carried on is ignored. The great anatomists of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries simply did not exist--Dr. White knows nothing
about them. There must be no admission that the Popes permitted
dissection or any other form of science. Dr. White makes his last
stand by a really marvelous tour d'esprit. It was Venice defying the
Vatican that permitted dissection. This, he supposes, may help him,
for anatom