This anatomical specimen dating to the 1200s is the oldest known in Europe.
Image: Archives of Medical Science
In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors' wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.
Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.
The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body. [Gallery: Historic Images of Human Anatomy]
The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe's anti-scientific "Dark Ages." In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.
"It's state-of-the-art," Charlier told LiveScience. "I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this."
Myths of the middle ages
Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.
But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That's because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn't so ignorant after all. [Busted! 10 Medieval Myths]
"There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward," said James Hannam, an historian and author of "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" (Regnery Publishing, 2011).
For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an "intellectual fad," he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.
Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.
As a result, "there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now," Hannam said.
Anatomical dark ages?
From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. ("They thought nothing of the sort," Hannam said.)
See what we're tweeting about
5 Comments
Add CommentIt is hard to keep a good perspective regarding "dark ages" and "enlightenment". How will we be judged? We've put a man on the moon and have creationists trying to force their religious beliefs into science classrooms. We have computers and the internet while we continue to burn fossil fuels putting the future at risk of climate changes we can only guess at. We have the human genome project played out against AIDS as God's punishment of gays. The author has done well to shed some light into the "darkness" of Medieval Science. If history is written by the victors (and my favorite is the conquest of the New World) how will the survivors of the 21st century, let alone the third millennia, write about this period of 7+ billion people and rising, with our irreversible and irreparable damage to the entire world's ecosystems? Will it be as we view the results of a "Holy Autopsy" with three gall stones the symbol of the Trinity? Or the view of the brain's anatomy after the head has been split open by a gladiator's sword? Fracking anyone?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance." actually, in many places in the world, including parts of the US, the dark ages never ended.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTalk about trying to rewrite history, eh?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey didn't call them the "dark ages" because of the Churche's "enlightenment" at the stake.
The Church has a long history of disdaining wisdom and knowledge in favor of blind, stupid faith. They opposed dissection, Galileo, and scores of other potential advances. (See White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Today they are fighting evolution, stem cell research, and global warming. That's quite a record to go up against. Mostly, Christianity retarded the advance of science, and still is. Why was Greek knowledge preserved only by Islam? Why was the library of Alexandria burned? Why did Christians destroy records of competing religions? Why did they torture heretics? That's not exactly science but it shows their opposition to anything that they don't approve of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. White is a thoroughly unreliable source. He suffers from exactly the sort of anticlerical bias described in the main article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. Greek knowledge was preserved both in the Arab world - which, I would remind you, was not "Islamic" until the advent of Islam in the 7th century - and Byzantium, and in Western Europe. Your idea about this is very skewed.
3. Your claim that the Catholic church is fighting evolution, stem cell research, and global warming conveniently overlooks the fact that many Protestant churches do the same thing. It also conveniently overlooks the achievements and contributions of Catholic and Protestant scientists through the years, as documented here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E2%80%93scientists) and here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science.)
Last but not least, the origins of your claims in personal animosity and prejudice are abundantly clear in what you wrote. You need to clear your mind of that sort of thinking, which is deeply unhealthy.