The rise of the anatomists

The rise of the anatomists

The rise of the anatomists

With the use of real bodies denied them, early teachers of anatomy had to rely on models made of wood, bone and other materials. Some of these were basic and hardly more than large three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, but others were superbly made, and with the introduction of wax as a modeling medium their precision reached astonishing levels even when considered today. This was the era of Madame Tussaud and others like her; their models were (and in some cases still are) works of art. But the fact remained: models, no matter how realistic, were no substitute for the real thing. Once the medical profession was free to delve, literally, into the secrets of the human body in the early 18th century, anatomy came into its own.

Early anatomy lectures were carried out in conditions hardly more hygienic than those of medieval times, with the lecturer and his assistants wearing their everyday clothes and maybe an apron; contemporary illustrations show dogs licking bowls of entrails under the table. But shocking and repulsive as these presentations and their star performers now seem, the knowledge gained was enormous and invaluable.

So important and popular were the lectures combined with dissec-tions that an immediate problem arose: lack of corpses. So great was the call for cadavers that the usual sources executed crimi-nals, suicides, unclaimed dead were soon insufficient to meet the demand. Stepping into the breach came the resurrection men' robbers of graves who were paid by unscrupulous or unquestioning anatomists for newly-dead corpses. So brisk was this gruesome trade that iron railings were sometimes placed over new gravestones by relatives of the bereaved. The need for undecomposed bodies also led to an even greater crime the random murder of people to be used as specimens.

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