History of Anatomy

Herophilus of Chalcedon (active c. 300–260 BCE) and his younger contemporary Erasistratus are credited with the first systematic dissections of human bodies in the Western medical tradition. The Ptolemaic rulers, who were building Alexandria into the ancient world’s centre of learning, tolerated — and, later sources claim, actively supplied — the practice, including the use of condemned criminals. Celsus and other later writers also claimed that Herophilus performed vivisection on living convicts; the authenticity of that claim is disputed, because it rests on second-hand and partly hostile testimony rather than on any surviving work of his. (Štrkalj & Chorn, South African Medical Journal, 2008)

Herophilus’s own writings are lost; his reputation rests on reports by later authors. The well-attested discoveries include the brain’s ventricles and the optic nerve, the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, the valves of the heart, and the ileum, a segment of the small intestine that still bears his name. Erasistratus, more interested in physiology than anatomy, studied the heart and the pulse.

The practice did not survive its founders. As Alexandrian society changed, human dissection disappeared from the Greek medical world and would not reappear in Western medicine for roughly fifteen centuries. What remained was a textual tradition — and a warning, repeated by later anatomists, that anatomy built without the opened body was speculation. (Štrkalj & Chorn, 2008)

Because human dissection was not available to him, Galen worked on animals — barbary macaques, pigs, oxen, and goats — and argued that the human body, as the most perfect of animals, could be read from them. In On Anatomical Procedures (De methodo sectionis corporis humani) he described his methods, and in On the Usefulness of the Parts (De usu partium) he gave the body a teleological reading that shaped medical thinking for over a millennium.

The animal basis produced errors that later dissectors would have to correct one by one. Galen described the human liver as having five lobes (as in the ox), the lower jaw as two bones (as in the ape), and the hand as having 29 bones where the human hand has 27; he held that the foramen ovale, an opening between the heart’s chambers, stays open in adult humans (as in the calf), and that the septum of the heart contains invisible pores through which blood passes (as in the pig). He also taught that arteries carry a vital pneuma rather than blood — an inference from the fact that animal arteries appear empty after death.

For centuries these claims were defended as much by Galen’s reputation as by evidence. Challenging them was not simply a matter of cutting a body; it was an attack on the most trusted authority in medicine. That is why the corrections that followed, from the sixteenth century on, were staged as public events.

Around 1050, the monk Constantine the African translated an anatomical compendium into Latin at Monte Cassino. The text, De re anatomica, was attributed to Galen but was in fact a sixth-century compilation; it became the standard European anatomy textbook for centuries, and with it the Galenic errors described above became the inherited curriculum of European medicine.

In the Islamic world, commentary on Galen and on Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine was a form of original argument. The Damascene physician Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), in his Commentary on the Anatomy of the Canon (c. 1242), rejected Galen’s pores in the heart’s septum and described blood passing from the right ventricle through the pulmonary artery to the lungs, where it mixes with air, and returning by the pulmonary vein to the left side. This is the first clear account of pulmonary circulation in the Western and Islamic medical literature; it did not, however, produce a full model of systemic circulation, and it remained largely unknown in Europe until modern manuscript scholarship.

In Europe, the knife returned at Bologna. By the early fourteenth century, public dissections were part of university medicine, and the Bolognese physician Mondino de Luzzi (1255–1326) fixed the pattern in his Anathomia (c. 1316; first printed at Pavia in 1478). The “Mondinian” method that followed for two centuries was essentially textual: a professor read the approved description while a barber-surgeon cut the body to match it. The cadaver confirmed the book; the book did not yield to the cadaver.

The Fabrica opened with an Epitome that catalogued Galen’s errors — the five-lobed liver, the two-boned jaw, the 29-boned hand, the foramen ovale left open in adults, the porous septum of the heart — and corrected each from Vesalius’s own dissections. The book’s famous woodcut cadavers, long attributed to a single artist (Jan Stephan van Calcar) and later to a “workshop of Titian,” are now understood as the work of several artists; the attribution debate is itself a reminder that the Fabrica was a collaborative, workshop product as much as an author’s. (National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web)

How much of the cutting Vesalius himself performed is still debated. He claimed to have dissected and directed the demonstrations personally; his rival Jacob Sylvius and other critics insisted that barber-surgeons did the work while the professor narrated. The dispute matters because it shows that the “Vesalian revolution” was not a single act of observation but a new arrangement of labour, spectacle, and print.

Dissection had become a public, architectural event. Padua, where Vesalius taught, had held university dissections since the fifteenth century; the purpose-built anatomy theatre that still stands there was completed in 1594, with the dissection table at the centre of a tiered audience. Similar theatres followed at Leiden (1595), Paris, London, and Amsterdam. The Padua theatre is treated as a timeline entry on this site.

The Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus described the pulmonary route of the blood in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). The book was suppressed and Servetus was burned in Geneva in 1553 for his theological views, so his anatomical description circulated almost not at all. The Paduan anatomist Realdo Colombo (1516–1559) gave a clearer account in De re anatomica (1559), but it too was little read in his lifetime.

The account that stuck was William Harvey’s. In Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628), the English physician argued from measurement: the heart ejects so much blood in an hour that the liver could not possibly produce it from food, so the blood must move in a continuous circuit. Harvey’s demonstration was experimental and quantitative, not merely descriptive, and it is why circulation is usually dated to him even though the pulmonary route had been described before. The blood-circulation timeline entry covers the controversy it triggered.

Harvey’s model still lacked its smallest links. The Italian microscopist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), examining fish lungs and frog mesentery in the 1660s, demonstrated the capillaries — the fine vessels connecting arteries and veins — and completed the circuit. Anatomy had by now become inseparable from the microscope, and the body’s interior was being mapped at a scale no dissection table could reach.

Dissection required bodies, and institutions rarely obtained them from every social group on equal terms. For most of the period covered here, the legal supply of cadavers came from executed criminals: in England and Scotland, dissection was itself a statutory addition to the punishment of hanging, and the public demonstration of state power and the teaching of medicine shared the same body.

As medical schools expanded, that supply ran out. In Edinburgh, the demand of the medical school fed a trade in stolen corpses carried out by “resurrection men,” and in 1828 the case of Burke and Hare — who supplied fresh bodies to the anatomist Robert Knox, and whose murders of at least sixteen people ended in trial, execution, and the dissection of one of the two as a posthumous punishment — forced a public reckoning with where anatomical knowledge was coming from. (Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 1987)

Britain’s Anatomy Act of 1832 (3 & 4 Will. 4, c. 75) reduced reliance on executed bodies by allowing unclaimed corpses from workhouses, asylums, and hospitals to be used for dissection when no one claimed them for burial. It did not make procurement equal or voluntary: people who died poor and unclaimed bore a disproportionate burden, and the Act did not even permit a person to direct by will that their own body be given for dissection — that came with the Burial Act of 1891.

Modern donation programmes place greater weight on consent, traceability, respectful handling, and memorial practice. Yet anatomical collections still require investigation of how older specimens were acquired and whether display or continued use can be justified — a question that now extends to colonial and indigenous remains held in European and American museums.