The anatomical Renaissance: the resurrection of the anatomical projects of the ancients

This is one of the most stimulating books on Renaissance medicine I have read, and, at the same time, one of the most perverse. It offers a series of challenging theses. The rise of anatomy in the sixteenth century is to be viewed, not as part of medicine or science, but of natural philosophy, a branch of theology concerned with investigating and demonstrating the works of God in nature. The classical authors who had concerned themselves with anatomy, Plato, Aristotle, Herophilus and Erasistratus, and Galen, each had his own idea ("project") of anatomy, as did the medieval scholar Mundinus; each had a different purpose and hence a different view of the body. Their anatomical projects were followed or recovered in turn by the anatomists of the Renaissance: Mundinus by Berengario, Galen by Vesalius, Sylvius and Guenther, the Alexandrians by Colombo, and Aristotle by Fabricius. Other anatomists, like Benedetti or Corti, make a brief appearance in the story, but Platonic anatomy (despite the survival of a major Galenic tract interpreting anatomy in Platonic terms) does not reappear in this account. There is much to applaud here, not least the elegant demonstration of the way in which Vesalius was the first to put into practice the programme for human dissection advocated by Galen. The influence of the new Galenic translations after 1530 is also well explained. The variety of Renaissance approaches to dissection is established beyond doubt, and historians will have to be careful about bringing under one roof all those who advocated dissection in the sixteenth century. But all these claims demand some qualification or other. "Project" can stand both for what is inferred of a Renaissance anatomist's motives and for what Dr Cunningham believes was the ancient project. Vesalius claimed to be restating a lost pre-Galenic anatomy: that honour is now given to Colombo, who depends allegedly on Erasistratus, although he never mentions his name. Berengario, despite his part in the 1528 version of Galen's anatomical works, is linked only to Mundinus, as is Benedetti, the title of whose anatomy book proclaimed its devotion to the restoration of Greek anatomy, at least in the form of a new technical vocabulary. Writers on anatomy who do not fit easily into this schema (e.g. Canano, Fallopia, or Piccolomini) are simply omitted on grounds of space. The impression of this half of the book is of ingenuity and abundant learning handicapped by the desire to impose a "big idea" on somewhat refractory evidence. Having sorted out the "what's" of Renaissance anatomy, Andrew Cunningham progresses in Part Two to the "why's". Why did these anatomists view the body in the varied way they did: why was there a renaissance or a reformation in anatomy? In a coruscating display of somewhat outdated scholarship (no O'Malley on Rome, Williams, not Cameron, on the radical reformation), past generations of scholars are castigated for their wrong categorizations and romantic misunderstandings. The key, it is asserted, lies in religion: an individual's religious views determined his conception and use of anatomy. This is not as unlikely as this blunt formulation might suggest. Paracelsus' rejection of anatomy and Servetus' discovery of the circulation may well owe something to their idiosyncratic theology. Melanchthon supported anatomy in part because of its value to Lutheran doctrine, but, pace Cunningham, he commended Fuchs' book on anatomy, not because of its Lutheranism but because it offered the most modern, student-friendly account then available (not a bad judgement). But the contortions required to bring other anatomists into line are often extreme. Vesalius is said to be a Lutheran in religion because he did for anatomy what Luther did for religion; because he published the Fabrica in Basle; and because a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, like the one on which he died, was sometimes imposed as a punishment by the Inquisition. The fact that Vesalius came from a strongly Catholic part of