The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical
Projects of the Ancients
English Historical Review, Feb, 1999, by Peregrine Horden
Fecha: 07/06/2004 Idioma: Inglés
 `I
read Galen's book On the bones to the students at least three
times before I dared perceive any mistake on Galen's part,
although now I can't be sufficiently astonished at my own
stupidity ...': Vesalius's report of his turning from the
book of Galen to `the non-lying book of the body' seems so
congenially modern and intelligible. Yet anatomy remains in
fact the hard nut of Renaissance medical historiography. In
recent years that historiography has done much to illuminate
the ways in which many sixteenth-century developments arose
from a creative engagement with ancient texts. The challenge
is to extend the analysis to a branch of medicine which, in
the hands of a Vesalius or a Harvey, seems so decisively to
shatter its intellectual mould.
The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical
Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997; pp.
xiv+ 283. 45 [pounds sterling]) is Andrew Cunningham's compelling
response, exemplified in his discussion of the paradoxes of
Vesalius's Fabrica. Here is the work of one who claimed to
have found 300 errors in Galen but who none the less organized
his own magnum opus on thoroughly Galenic lines. `What [Vesalius]
was criticizing was not Galen, nor Galen's project, but the
points at which Galen himself had not fulfilled it properly'
(p. 116). Galen had dissected only apes. Vesalius, as Galen's
avatar, would now do what had not been possible in the second
century. Far from repudiating the master's anatomy, he was,
in a sense `humanizing' it. One means to that end was to draw
inspiration from yet earlier anatomists, those of Hellenistic
Alexandria who had actually dissected human beings. So they
too played a small role in Vesalius's intellectual evolution.
Elsewhere in Cunningham's book they loom larger.
Declining to allow Vesalius to stand for the whole of Renaissance
anatomizing, he considers a range of figures. And he shows,
in Part I of his book, how the whole anatomical Renaissance
can be taken as a decidedly un-Whiggish story in which the
real `progress' is that by which each generation revives ever
more ancient guides, from the medieval Mondino in the early
1500s to Aristotle at the century's close. Part II turns to
explanation. Cunningham is reluctant to account for this recourse
to antiquity simply in terms of wider humanist trends. Prompted
by his anatomists' emphasis on the body as the instrument
of the soul, he looks to a concurrent return ad fontes and
examines how far the anatomical theories surveyed can be assigned
to Reformation -- or at least anti-papal- milieux. Success
here is more variable.
The spiritualized, very un-Greek, anatomies of Paracelsus
and Servetus clearly owed much to their respective radical
Protestantisms. But Cunningham's introduction of them into
the discussion confuses the question of why there was an anatomical
Renaissance with that of where and why anatomy became so popular.
Determining the appropriate religious niche for unrepentant
humanists proves much harder. Fabricius's avoiding of theological
parti pris in his reading of Aristotle accords well with the
Venetian religio-political scene. But Vesalius, who studied
medicine in Paris, became physician to Charles V, and died
returning from pilgrimage, is the `Luther of anatomy' only
by analogy: if a Protestant, then a deeply cryptic one --
unless religion as well as typographical perfectionism determined
his having the Fabrica printed in Basel. The second half of
Cunningham's book is therefore less satisfying than the first.
Both halves will, however, undoubtedly provoke much further
research.
Those producing it might avoid Cunningham's doctrinaire epistemological
relativism (each anatomist sees literally a different body)
but will do well if they match his vigour in argument, lucidity
of exposition, and familiarity with the primary texts.
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