The Anatomical Renaissance

The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients

Andrew Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351894975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The central proposition of this book is that the great anatomists of the Renaissance, from Vesalius to Fabricius and Harvey - the forebears of modern scientific biology and medicine - consciously resurrected not merely the methods but also the research projects of Aristotle and other Ancients. The Moderns' choice of topics and subjects, their aims, and their evaluation of their investigations were all made in a spirit of emulation, not rejection, of their distant predecessors. First published in 1997, Andrew Cunningham's masterly analysis of the history of the 'scientific renaissance' - a history not of things found, but of projects of enquiry - provoked a reappraisal of the intellectual roots of the Renaissance as well as illuminating debates on the history of the body and its images.

PART 1
The Anatomical Renaissance

Antoni Gaudí

Originality means to return to the origin.

Introduction: The Anatomical Renaissance

It is commonly accepted that in western Europe, in the period from around 1450 to around 1600, there was a ‘Renaissance’: a great intellectual movement of rebirth (‘renaissance’) aimed at restoring the ways of thinking and acting which had been typical of ancient Greece and Rome. This Renaissance is generally taken as marking the end of the medieval world and hence the beginnings of our ‘modern’ world. This movement has left its most obvious monuments in painting and architecture, but it affected music, modes of writing, philosophy and most other areas of intellectual endeavour too.

It is the common view of historians of medicine and anatomy that in the period of the Renaissance anatomy and anatomizing too underwent a rebirth; that is to say, that anatomizing became reformed according to ancient Greek principles – and that this was the great turning-point in the history of anatomy which marks the beginning of recognizably modern understandings of the functioning and anatomy of the human body. We may refer to this as ‘the anatomical Renaissance’.¹

The general interpretation offered by historians of the last 50 years about the nature of the anatomical Renaissance may be characterized as follows:

1. That Andreas Vesalius was the central figure whose efforts most contributed to effecting an anatomical Renaissance, and that his book of 1543 on the structure of the human body, usually referred to as the Fabrica, was the anatomical Renaissance put into print.
2. That this anatomical Renaissance consisted essentially of a rejection of the ‘dead hand’ of the ancient anatomical authorities, Aristotle and especially Galen, on the minds of Renaissance anatomists.
3. That the Ancients’ doctrines were replaced by the revival of an alternative ancient Greek tradition in anatomy, that of ‘seeing-for- oneself’ (autopsia) and personal experience of dissection.
4. That the adoption of this revived tradition of investigation brought into being the beginnings of modern, scientific, anatomy.²

We can take Charles O’Malley, the most recent biographer of Vesalius, as a representative historian holding this point of view. In the opening passage of his biography of Vesalius O’Malley states: ‘Andreas Vesalius is now recognized by most scholars as the founder of modern anatomy . . . it was Vesalius who made the foundation secure by his factual contributions and, more important, by his method of presentation and by the scientific principle he enunciated as fundamental to research. His constant reiteration of this principle obliged anatomy to remain modern . . .’³ Writing elsewhere on Vesalius, O’Malley expounds on what this principle was which ‘obliged anatomy to remain modern’ (in O’Malley’s view):

More important than the anatomical information contained in the Fabrica was the scientific principle enunciated therein. This was beyond criticism, fundamental to anatomical research, and has remained so. It was not difficult to demonstrate Galen’s errors of anatomy, but such a demonstration was only a means to an end . . . no one had proposed a consistent policy of doubting the authority of Galen or of any other recognized authority until the only true source of anatomical knowledge – dissection and observation of the human structure – had been tested. With the publication of the Fabrica all major investigators of anatomy were compelled to recognize the new principle, even though at first some paid no more than lip service to it.⁴

This understanding that the Vesalian moment made anatomy scientific, in the modern sense of the term ‘scientific’, is shared by virtually all historians of anatomy. Even a historian as sophisticated as Jerome J. Bylebyl, can head one of the chapters of his thesis ‘Vesalius, Colombo, and Falloppia and the development of scientific anatomy’; he does not spell out what ‘scientific anatomy’ means, probably because he can assume an understanding of the term on the part of his readers. Similarly, he does not question the view that Vesalius’s work was the most basic contribution to making anatomy scientific.

So according to historians such as O’Malley, in anatomy the Renaissance did not consist of reviving the actual projects or views of the ancient anatomists themselves, but of reviving those most fundamental methods of the investigation of Nature, originated by the ancient Greeks (the methods, that is, of observation and personal experience) which had not been sufficiently rigorously followed either by the Ancients themselves or by their later medieval followers. In the eyes of such historians of anatomy, the adoption of these basic methods (observation and personal experience) thus allowed the anatomists of the sixteenth century to see more clearly the truths of the body that lay in front of their eyes, without their sight any longer being obscured by having to kow-tow to the authority and the letter of the texts of the Ancients. It thus allowed them to be properly scientific in their approach to anatomy. Vesalius’s generation of anatomists was the first that began to do this, so it is regarded as inevitable that they did it still imperfectly, but their work is taken to mark the beginning of modern scientific anatomy because their example encouraged later workers to see yet more clearly.

There would, I think, still be little dispute still today with this broad characterization of what constituted the Renaissance in anatomy, at least outside the small world of professional historians of anatomy and medicine. But in recent years, within that small world, historical research has indicated that the picture is somewhat more complex than this. Interest has focused, perhaps inevitably, on William Harvey and his discovery of the circulation of the blood, a discovery made in England in the 1610s and announced publicly in 1628. Harvey is seen as the crowning point of the anatomical Renaissance and as the most modern of all Renaissance anatomists in that he brought to light this fundamental phenomenon which underlies all our modern understandings of the functioning of the body and which was quite unknown to the Ancients and medievals. A number of historians, led by Walter Page,⁵ have pointed out how frequently Harvey remarked on his indebtedness to, and admiration of, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle; not just his indebtedness to Aristotle’s attitude toward observation and personal experience, but to Aristotle’s writings on what constitutes proper knowledge and how it is to be gained, and to his particular anatomical doctrines too. Instead of rejecting Aristotle, as the general characterization of the anatomical Renaissance given above would have led us to expect, we now find instead that Harvey – the one we see as the most modern of all Renaissance anatomists – explicitly and avowedly praised Aristotle and acknowledged the high importance that Aristotle had for him and the guidance for his own work that he found in the work of Aristotle.

I am treading in the footsteps of other people who have borne a light in front of me in this business [Harvey wrote], and I employ their terms as much as possible. Above all others I follow Aristotle from among the Ancients, Hieronymous Fabricius ab Aquapendente from among the Moderns; I follow Aristotle as Leader, Fabricius as Pathfinder.⁶

In recognizing the veneration in which Harvey held Aristotle, recent historians of anatomy have accommodated in different ways this seeming contradiction over what the anatomical Renaissance consisted of. If in making his great modern discovery Harvey admired and followed Aristotle the Ancient, does this mean that Harvey was less modern than we thought (which is basically Pagel’s position)? Or does it mean (as another historian, Gweneth Whitteridge, seems to think) that while we may continue to regard Harvey as being as modern as ever, we now need to look at the Ancients, and particularly Aristotle, as having been more modern than we thought? Strictly speaking this interpretation would of course be a contradiction in terms, since thereby the Ancients become the Moderns! Either way of coping with this dilemma implies questions about the precise form and nature of the anatomical Renaissance, and about the way in which the Renaissance supposedly constituted the great turning-point which separated the ancient from the modern views of the body.

A few years ago, in pursuit of an understanding of what Harvey meant when he said he was following ‘Aristotle as Leader, Fabricius as Pathfinder’ in his anatomical work, I decided to look at the anatomical enterprise of Fabricius, Harvey’s own teacher at Padua. I speak of Fabricius’s ‘anatomical enterprise’ rather than of his ‘anatomical achievements’, because I was deliberately refraining from seeking apparent modern features in his work; instead I was trying to discover what Fabricius’s general undertaking or project was, in his own terms. These are the kinds of question I was asking: How did Fabricius choose topics to explore? How did he explore them? How did he investigate his material? What was the nature of this material? What constituted an answer for him? At what point did he think a particular inquiry was finished? (or, to put it another way, how did he know when to stop?), and so on. What I discovered was that Fabricius was trying to resurrect the research programme of Aristotle in anatomy.⁷ Although it conforms to what Fabricius himself says he was doing, and also to what Harvey says about Fabricius and Aristotle being his only mentors, this was nevertheless a quite novel finding in the history of anatomy. For it gave a completely new role to the anatomizing of one of the Ancients, supposedly the deadest and deadliest of the dead hands of authority: Aristotle. Not only had the anatomizing of Aristotle not (as we used to think) been rejected by the Moderns of the sixteenth century, and not only had it been praised by some of them (as we had begun to recognize), but it had actually been deliberately selected by one of them, Fabricius, to be the model and pattern for his own practice of anatomy.

As a result of this work I came to think that the anatomical Renaissance as a whole ought to be seen not as a matter of the rejection of the doctrines and practices of the Ancients who performed anatomy, but as an attempt to emulate them, and to emulate not only their methods (observation and seeing-for-oneself in dissection) but also their entire projects of investigation, as those projects were understood by the sixteenth-century anatomists. It seemed to me that this project of Fabricius differed radically from the anatomizing of Vesalius in the previous generation. So in that piece on Fabricius I suggested that there might well have been other, different, anatomical projects being carried out in the Renaissance – different from that of Fabricius – and which were attempts to revive the anatomical work of other Ancients of anatomy. The implication of this, in turn, is that there could have been as many anatomical projects revived in the Renaissance as there had been practised in Antiquity! This again was a novel thought, for up till now it has been taken for granted by historians that the history of anatomy is one single monolithic history; that, since Antiquity onwards, just one project of anatomy has been undertaken by all anatomists, to which each anatomist has made such contributions as he was able.

The present book is the product of working through these hunches and asking both of the Ancients of anatomy and of some of their Renaissance (Modern) counterparts: what project of anatomising were they engaged in? I found that they were indeed engaged in several differing projects and that the Modern projects of the sixteenth century were attempts to recover and practise anew the projects of one or other of the Ancients. The Modern projects really were attempts to give new birth (renaissance) to the Ancient projects, not to reject them.

If it is indeed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the volume:
• Credits
• Preface
• PART 1 The Anatomical Renaissance
• PART 2 The Anatomical Reformation? An Enquiry
• Index