manuscripts flowing into Italy—and the movable type printing press was
invented. Conventional wisdom holds that individualism was born in 1500
C.E.,^10 and it is no accident that the refinement of mirrors and the
appearance of the first self-portraits are coincident. “Self-consciousness,
introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself,”
writes Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization.^11 Man could see
himself for the first time, and as the personage came into focus, property
rights and legal customs began to revolve around the individual, rather
than the former collective units of family, tribe, city, or kingdom.^12 The
new individualism and humanism of the mid–15th century would compel
prodigies to turn their gaze inward, to explore the motives of the mind and
the corpus, and, following Columbus’s example, to discobrir the fabric of
the human body. Our interior thoughts and our physical makeup became
fertile ground for exploration at the fading of the Dark Ages, and the
surveyors who sharpened their gaze on the human body had no idea about
the new continents that lay before them.
The decline of human dissection in Alexandria at about 150 B.C.E., at the
time of Herophilus and Erasistratus, presaged the extinction of the medical
school in what had been the most advanced center of scientific study in the
world. The incorporation of Alexandria into the Roman Empire in 30 B.C.E.
further codified the opposition to human dissection, both by statute and
general pagan religious sentiment.^13 As we have seen, it was Galen (129–
199 C.E.) who became the unquestioned anatomical authority, even without
ever dissecting a human cadaver or performing an autopsy. His
investigations were animal-based, including barnyard animals and Barbary
apes.
The prohibition of human dissection continued through the Muslim
epoch of intellectual leadership from the 8th to the 13th centuries, with
only scattered original anatomic investigations. “The anatomical
knowledge of Islam was merely that of Galen in Moslem dress,”^14 and the
great Arabic translators were merely recapitulating what Galen had
claimed. Curiously, it may have been the practice of dismemberment,
boiling, and cleansing of bones of crusaders who had died in the distant
East for easier transport back home that laid the foundation for the revival
of human dissection.