Francesca solemnly turns my way, and with a warm smile, asks if I’m
ready to visit the anatomy theater: I eagerly say yes. Leaving the timeworn
room behind (which faces the street below), we walk through an
undersized door and enter a low-ceilinged small room with almost no
lighting.
Craning my neck and bending forward, dodging heavy, hand-hewn
timbers set at an angle, I follow my guide’s voice in the inky blackness.
Francesca flips a switch over in the corner, and I become aware of a tiny
constellation of lights around me. I still don’t understand the framing
around me, but as my eyes become accustomed to the low-light conditions,
I realize I am standing in the opening of a great funnel, forty feet high with
multiple levels of rising, concentric elliptical circles. I am in the world’s
oldest anatomy theater, and I am standing where the body would have laid
on a table.
The theater structure was built into the large, empty room, and was
made of logs and hand-fitted planks and boards. Rising at a steep angle,
the succeeding levels supported a circular ring of boards just deep enough
to support the human foot. On the inner side of the ring on each level was
a wooden rail at about the level of a man’s knees. This theater was built
for standing, and the banisters and balustrades (carved of walnut) kept
even a fainting man from falling forward.
The Padua anatomy theater was built in 1594 for Hieronymus Fabricius,
the custodian of the anatomical heritage of Vesalius and the man who
would train Harvey. As the councilor of the English Nation, Harvey was
positioned in the front row of anatomy demonstrations, always held during
the colder months of the year where a rotting corpse was less pungent.
Much of what Harvey was taught was the old Aristotelian medicine, which
he would continue to practice once he returned to England. Steeped in
Hippocratic humourism, Harvey was of an age of unscientific analysis and
primitive understanding of organ function; in fact, he would remain a
Galenic physician till his death.
To understand how revolutionary Harvey’s 1628 book—De Motu
Cordis, On the Motion of the Heart—was, one has to contemplate what his
professors taught him about the heart and the blood vessels. Galen’s
conclusions about the generation of blood, the function of the heart, and
blood flow were sacrosanct—and entirely and (by today’s standards)