Protestant and Catholic medicine in the sixteenth century? The case of Ingolstadt anatomy.

There is an ongoing debate about the relation between religious confession and sixteenth-century medicine. Although it is generally agreed that Richard Toellner's statement "In Wittenberg the Reformation does not affect the medical faculty", which closes a paper published in 1984,' cannot be maintained in this apodictic formulation, recent research still discusses how and to what extent confessional matters might have influenced sixteenth-century medical thinking. Interest has focused in particular on the "anatomical Renaissance", as Andrew Cunningham's book is entitled,2 which reviewed the works of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) and several sixteenth-century anatomists as well as the dissemination of their ideas celebrated by generations of medical historians as the beginning ofmodem anatomical research. In his paper on 'Wittenberg anatomy' Vivian Nutton showed in 1994 that a special view of anatomical knowledge was taken at Wittenberg University.3 According to Nutton, Wittenberg anatomy must be considered as an "education process in which