3:26PM BST 10 Jun 2009
I thought I was fairly immune to popular myths and vulgar errors about science and religion. Hardly anyone believed in a flat Earth in the Middle Ages, I knew. Nor did I wishfully think that Einstein believed in a personal God like the one in the Bible.
So I was jolted to discover I was wrong in supposing that the medieval Church forbade human dissection. Disabuse came from Professor Katharine Park of Harvard, the author of a history of human dissection. I haven't read that work, for it might interfere with my nightly repose, but I have just read her chapter in a splendid book called Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, £20.95).
The book's editor and 11 more of its 25 contributors are agnostic or atheist but they care "about setting the record straight". They are joined in the task by seven Protestants, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Catholic and a pious Spinozist – who, like Einstein, believes in a sort of God of cosmic order.
My ignorant notion was that the medieval Church had been hostile to anatomy classes using human corpses. I would have accepted the claim that Pope Boniface VIII had outlawed them in a bull called Detestande feritatis ("Of detestable cruelty") in 1299.
Why not? Our bodies are meant to be temples of the Holy Ghost and can't be put to any old use. We must not maim ourselves, as Origen was said to have done. We know, moreover, that our bodies will rise again – not that we are foolish enough to fear missing parts would prevent God from keeping his promise of this. We revere remains of saints, as they have reference to their holy lives, and we treat dead bodies with pious courtesy because they were once part of a human being made in God's image.
So Vesalius, the 16th‑century anatomist, wrote Andrew Dickson Wright in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) "risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church". Not so, Professor Park explains.
Human dissection does not seem to have been practised regularly in pagan, Jewish, Christian or Muslim cultures before the end of the 13th century, she writes, except by some Greek scholars in third-century BC Alexandria.
Dissection in the service of teaching and research began in Bologna about 1300, inspired by renewed interest in Galen, the second-century writer. The first anatomy textbook based on human dissection was written by Mondino de' Liuzzi (1275-1326), and it was a staple of university instruction into the 16th century. From Italy, dissection spread north, being performed at universities in both Catholic and Protestant regions by the 16th century.
What Boniface's bull forbade was the boiling of the flesh of corpses from bones as a funerary practice. The prohibition was taken narrowly, and Mondino noted that it prevented him from boiling ear-bones to make them easier to examine. But dispensations from the law could be granted.
"I know of no case in which an anatomist was ever prosecuted," writes Professor Park, "and no case in which the Church ever rejected a request for a dispensation."
Anatomists did not rob graves because dissection was prohibited. Grave-robbing was forbidden by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities, before and after anatomists had resorted to it. Corpses were stolen because families did not want their relations publicly dissected. Naked exhibition of dead kin was shameful; private post mortems held no fears.
So Leonardo dissected an aged patient whom he had befriended at the hospital of Santa Maria Nova, Florence. As an artist he had no standing to request a corpse for medical research, but he did not get into trouble.
To Professor Parks I owe thanks for blowing away of this cobweb of false myth. It is a breath of fresh air.