Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/350

 disinterred, for purposes of dissection, the body of a man who had been hung for some crime. At first the authorities merely winked at such transgressions, but at the same time they made no attempts to have the law against dissecting annulled or at least modified. Then, at a somewhat later period, the conviction became general among the intelligent members of the community that, unless work of this nature were officially sanctioned, no real advance in the knowledge of human anatomy could be made, and—what was probably of even greater importance in their estimation—that Bologna might at the same time lose a good deal of its superiority over its rivals as a centre of learning; and accordingly it was found practicable to grant the desired sanction with many modifying restrictions attached. Then, with the further lapse of time, other medical schools fell into line and secured from the authorities similar privileges for their teachers and pupils. Thus, in 1368, the Senate of Venice authorized the medical school of that city to make a public dissection of a human body once every year; and, eight years later, the University of Montpellier acquired the same privilege. In 1391 John I. of Spain was equally generous in his treatment of the Medical School at Lerida. After the opening of the fifteenth century no further difficulties of a serious nature were experienced by the teachers of anatomy in procuring at least some material for dissecting purposes, and with each succeeding year such facilities steadily increased. Unfortunately, however, there did not follow a corresponding increase in the knowledge of human anatomy. As a matter of fact, it was not until during the sixteenth century that any really valuable work was accomplished in this branch of medicine. Guy de Chauliac, in the first chapter of his treatise ("La Grande Chirurgie"), gives the following description of the manner in which Bertrucius taught anatomy in Bologna at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and from this account it is easy to understand why the additions to our stock of information in this department of medicine were so few and so unimportant during this long period. The so-called dissecting, it clearly appears, was in reality a not very