A note on the anatomical accessus of the Middle Ages.

IN COMMENTING on the classical authors the medieval commentators very often used a formal introduction setting out a number of topics to be treated in the commentary upon the text. This accessus ad auctores has been discussed by Quain,' who lists a wide variety of branches of study in which the accessus was used; the only significant oniission from this list is medicine. Medical examples, however, have been pointed out by Temkin,2 and the topic as a whole has been dealt with in medicine by Cunningham.3 It is the purpose of this note to draw the attention of historians to the use of a form of accessus in anatomy and to make some tentative suggestions about the relationship between the accessus and the beginning of human dissection in the West. The accessus is traced back by Quain to Ammonius, the fifth-century commentator on Aristotle. Ammonius was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, rhetorician, and grammarian: like Aristotle, he did not write anything on medicine, and the medical use of the accessus was borrowed from these other fields of study. The philosophers used the format of the accessus more rigorously than the rhetoricians, grammarians, and lawyers, and from the examples given below, it appears that the medical use of the form was even more flexible. The "school" of Ammonius includes all those who were interested in Aristotle from the fifth to seventh centuries, and it was, then, as a means of understanding Aristotle that the accessus developed. (At this point it should also be noted that the late classical and early medieval commentators gave much attention to the Categories4 of Aristotle. The results of this are suggested below.) The medical acctssus was an elaboration of the last of ten questions which were considered mandatory by the philosophers in an introduction to any work of Aristotle. *Roger French, M.A., D.Phil., Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3EL.