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 the period of time about which I am now writing, and for many centuries afterward, there existed among all classes of the community a very strong prejudice against dissecting human corpses. And even Galen himself appears to have shared this prejudice, for, in spite of his intense eagerness to gain a more perfect knowledge of human anatomy, he apparently did not dare to undertake any such investigation, even when a favorable opportunity for so doing presented itself, as it did on the occasion to which he refers in the following brief extract taken from one of his treatises:—

A carelessly constructed sepulchre on the banks of a river had been undermined during a season of flood, and the corpse thus set free had floated down stream a short distance, until it finally lodged on the shore of a small cove. Passing near by I had the opportunity of inspecting this corpse. The fleshy parts had already disappeared to a great extent through the process of decomposition, but the bones were still held together by their fibrous connections. The picture presented to the eye was that of a human skeleton specially prepared for the instruction of young physicians. On another occasion, a few steps from the main road, I came across the dead body of a robber who had been killed by the traveler whose money he had attempted to steal. The peasants of that neighborhood were not willing to bury the corpse of such a bad man, and they accordingly allowed it to remain at the spot where it was first discovered. In the course of the following two days, as might be expected, the vultures removed every particle of flesh from the bones, so that, when I saw what remained of the body, the only thing visible was a nicely cleaned skeleton.

(Le Clerc: Histoire de la Médecine, p. 711.)

Here were two excellent opportunities for gaining the additional knowledge of human anatomy which Galen so much desired, but he evidently was not at all disposed to avail himself of them—doubtless because his mind was deeply imbued with the feeling that any such interference on his part would be a sacrilegious act. Under the circumstances, therefore, there was nothing left for him to do but to utilize animals for purposes of dissection, and more particularly apes, whose anatomy very closely resembles