Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/169

Rh the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie, he' did not wish to fight the Inquisition, and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this superstition. Still, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France, creating an energetic opposition in the Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon him, especially from the theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his collected works.*

Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius. During the middle ages there had been developed various theological doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon arguments showing what the body ought to be, and naturally, when anatomical science showed what it is, these doctrines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a wide-spread belief of the twelfth century, that during the year in which the cross of Christ was taken by Saladin, children, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other. It was also held upon the authority of Genesis that the Almighty created man literally out of the dust of the earth, and breathed life into his nostrils. This twofold creation was a favorite subject with illuminators of missals, and especially with those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first