at the
Italian universities in the fourteenth century. This passage deserves to
be quoted at some length because there are even serious historians who
still cite a Bull of Pope Boniface VIII, issued in 1300, forbidding the
boiling and dismembering of bodies in order to transport them to long
distances for burial in their own country, as being, either rightly or
wrongly, interpreted as a prohibition of dissection and, therefore,
preventing the development of anatomy. In the notes to his history of
dissection during this period in Bologna Roth says: "Without doubt the
passage in Guy de Chauliac which tells of having frequently seen
dissections, must be considered as referring to Bologna. This passage
runs as follows: 'My master Bertruccius conducted the dissection very
often after the following manner: the dead body having been placed upon
a bench, he used to make four lessons on it. In the first the
nutritional portions were treated, because they are so likely to become
putrefied. In the second, he demonstrated the spiritual members; in the
third, the animate members; in the fourth, the extremities.'" (Roth,
"Andreas Vesalius." Basel, 1896.)

Bertruccio's master, Mondino, is hailed in the history of medicine as
the father of dissection. His book on dissection was for the next three
centuries in the hands of nearly every medical scholar in Europe who was
trying to do good work in anatomy. It was not displaced until Vesalius
came, the father of modern anatomy, who revolutionized the science in
the Renaissance time. Mondino had devoted himself to the subject with
unfailing ardor and enthusiasm, and from everywhere in Europe the
students came to receive inspiration in his dissecting-room. Within a
few years such was the enthusiasm for dissection aroused by him in
Bologna that there were many legal prosecutions for body-snatching, the
consequence doubtless of a regulation of the Medical Department of the
University of Bologna, that if the students brought a body to any of
their teachers he was bound to dissect it for them. Bertruccio,
Mondino's disciple and successor, continued this great work, and now
Chauliac, the third in the tradition, was to carry the Bolognese methods
back to France, and his position as chamberlain to the Pope was to give
them a wide vogue throughout the world. The great French surgeon's
attitude toward anatomy and dissection can be judged from his famous
expression that "the surgeon ignorant of anatom