Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.
In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that's why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.
The first example of one of these "holy autopsies" came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess' heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.
Other autopsies were entirely secular. In 1286, an Italian physician conducted autopsies in order to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic, according to Charlier and his colleagues.
Some of the belief that the church frowned on autopsies may have come from a misinterpretation of a papal edict from 1299, in which the Pope forbade the boiling of the bones of dead Crusaders. That practice ensured Crusaders' bones could be shipped back home for burial, but the Pope declared the soldiers should be buried where they fell.
"That was interpreted in the 19th century as actually being a stricture against human dissection, which would have surprised the Pope," Hannam said.
Well-studied head
While more investigation of the body was going on in the Middle Ages than previously realized, the 1200s remain the "dark ages" in the sense that little is known about human anatomical dissections during this time period, Charlier said. When he and his colleagues began examining the head-and-shoulders specimen, they suspected it would be from the 1400s or 1500s.
"We did not think it was so antique," Charlier said.
But radiocarbon dating put the specimen firmly in the 1200s, making it the oldest European anatomical preparation known. Most surprisingly, Charlier said, the veins and arteries are filled with a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury. This would have helped preserve the body as well as give the circulatory system some color, as cinnabar mercury has a red tint.
Thus, the man's body was not simply dissected and tossed away; it was preserved, possibly for continued medical education, Charlier said. The man's identity, however, is forever lost. He could have been a prisoner, an institutionalized person, or perhaps a pauper whose body was never claimed, the researchers write this month in the journal Archives of Medical Science.
The specimen, which is in private hands, is set to go on display at the Parisian Museum of the History of Medicine, Charlier said.
"This is really interesting from a historical and archaeological point of view," Charlier said, adding, "We really have a lack of skeletons and anthropological pieces."
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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.