The handling of human biological material such as blood, and exposing organs and tissues carrying infectious diseases wasn’t always an elegant procedure conducted in a sterilized operating theater with hi-tech surgical instruments. The road to medical science has been everything but simple. Learning about the human body entailed many trial-and-error procedures, difficulties, and taboos that didn’t have anything to do with scientific practice. However this journey would have never been possible without one particular element: corpses.
During the Renaissance, anthropocentrism turned man into the essence and measure of all things. While God still retained his dominant role like in the Middle-Ages, his importance was displaced by the human need to know more about their own nature and how the body functioned. The ruling mechanistic ideas of that time conceived human body as a complex machine whose anatomical construction and mysterious organs could reveal secrets and mysteries.
Up: Anatomy Lesson by Dr. Willen van der Meer (1617) by Michael Jansz Van Mierevelt. Down: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch (1863), by Adriaen Baker.
Anatomy became the discipline that would help humankind uncover the body’s mysteries. During that period, there were already some studies on the body dating from ancient times and the Middle Ages. They were useful, but with every light shone a new conundrum arose. Curiosity forced humanity to seek deeper and deeper into themselves to examine every centimeter of the human body.
Of course, at that time it was really hard to find someone who would be willing to lend their body for anatomical study. There was a general distrust towards new scientific disciplines, so scientists had no option but to steal the bodies from burial sites. This body snatching practice was incredibly popular in the 19th century, and corpses were sold to illustrate lectures in medical schools.
Up: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (1656) by Rembrandt. Down: The Anatomist (1869) by Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max.
Belgian physician, Andreas Vesalius became a dissection pioneer during the Renaissance. He compared his findings with those of Hippocrates and Galen in order to arrive to more accurate conclusions. He was an author of seven books that were the foundation of modern anatomy. On the side, he was also involved in the illegal trade of dead bodies. A practice, as we previously mentioned, that was quite popular in his social circles. He was known to gain access to the bodies of executed prisoners so he could use them in his medical practices.
Corpses were crucial for medicine to be consolidated as a scientific discipline. It allowed physicians to recognize the different systems and organs and differentiate a healthy person from an ill one.
It took a while for this trade to be acknowledged, it was until 1832 with the Anatomy Act that unclaimed bodies and those donated by loved ones could be used for scientific study.
Reason was the guiding force behind this science, suddenly the separation of bones and cartilage from muscles and ligaments was an imperative to discover the functioning of different systems.
The Gross Clinic (1875) by Thomas Eakins
The Agnew Clinic (1889), by Thomas Eakins
With the rise of medicine and the possibilities it could offer to the scientist, corpse dissections became quite popular in the seventeenth century. Students, professors, physicians, and the general public looked forward to the moment when a group of surgeons would start their first interventions. As laws limited this kind of public exhibitions, first-hand anatomy lessons became an act that was as stunning as it was educational.
The most famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt, depicts a scene that would be recreated in Flemish paintings, when the fascination for medicine and dissection would seize society completely. Professors and surgeons curiously group around Nicolaes Tulp, an influential Doctor from Amsterdam, inside the Waag Amphitheater, a place that became known as the “Theatrum Anatomicum” (anatomy auditorium) of the seventeenth century.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), Rembrandt.
Outside the limits of this painting, dozens of people would observe the way Tulp worked with the upper left limb of the body and showed the muscles, tendons, and bones that are part of the forearm. In the bottom right corner we can see a book that is presumed to guide the physician. The book is a colossal treatise by Vesalius, titled De humani corporis fabrica, the text that would lead modern anatomy from that moment onwards. As for the protagonist of this composition, his name was Adriaan Adriaanszoon, a 40 year old man who had been condemned to capital punishment due to armed robbery.
Rembrandt made this painting by request from Tulp himself when he was 26 years old. This work expresses the union between the theory and praxis of a method that was considered abhorrent and outrageous. The physician that examined anatomy through diagrams and notes was now left in the past, as well as the “filthy” act of exploring a real human body.
“¡Y tenía corazón!” (1890) – Enrique Simonet Lombardo
This was only the beginning of a tradition that soon became popular in the United Kingdom, a country that didn’t have enough corpses for dissection. Medical practitioners came up with their own alternatives by desecrating and robbing corpses. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, schools of medicine in London and Edinburg offered ridiculous sums of money to “Resurrectionist” groups, who would loot burial grounds, mass graves, and tombs to get the freshest corpses. Everything was for the sake of medicine.
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Translated by Andrea Valle
