The renewed interest in medical learning in the Italian Peninsula, first
in Salerno, and later in Bologna and Padua, inspired young researchers to
ignore the prohibitory bull of Boniface VIII of 1299 and perform the first
human dissections. The bull was “directed not against human dissection
but against the practice of boiling dead bodies of those far from home [for
burial in their own homeland] ... the papacy never issued any statement
specifically opposing dissection although there seem to have been
instances in which overzealous local ecclesiastical authorities, by
interpretation or misinterpretation, did oppose the practice.”^15 It is simply
not true to claim that the church forbade dissection; ironically it was the
Roman pagans who enacted these laws that had lasting power until the
1300s, and it was their Italian descendants who most powerfully
challenged and reversed the laws.
Mondino de Luzzi, a physician from Bologna, Italy, became the first
important dissector of the Middle Ages, publishing the classic Anatomia,
in 1316. This was the first modern book devoted solely to anatomy, and
while it appears that Mondino relied heavily upon Galen’s writings, it is
clear that much of the book was based upon his own anatomic dissections.
Anatomia is simple, concise, and systematic, and would be the guide to
anatomists for two hundred years, helping spark medical curiosity across
Europe. The University of Bologna was, therefore, the first home of the
revived practice of dissection and study of the human body^16 ; the revival
would soon spread to Padua, Venice, and Florence throughout the 1300s,
and later to Siena, Perugia, Genoa, and Pisa by 1501. Again, while the sins
of the Catholic Church, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries, were
legion, the prohibition of human dissection was not one of them, as is
commonly claimed.
It is no coincidence that the rise of anatomical understanding,
humanistic self-awareness, and enriched artistic representation occurred
simultaneously in the Italian Renaissance. In the early 16th century,
Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer, and Titian
coexisted, competed, and, occasionally, cooperated. In 1502, Giacomo
Berengario was appointed chair of surgery and anatomy at the University
of Bologna (situated halfway between Florence and Venice) and would
become Mondino’s successor, writing Commentaria (1521), an extensive
work of almost a thousand pages (possible only because of the printing
revolution). Berengario was the first physician “not constantly