Stiff by Mary Roach Read Free Book Online Page B

preserved prosections?
    There have been times and places, in history, when the answer to the question "Is human dissection necessary?" was unequivocally yes. Here are some examples of what can happen when you try to figure out how a human body works without actually opening one up. In ancient China, Confucian doctrine considered dissection a defilement of the human body and forbade its practice. This posed a problem for the Father of Chinese Medicine, Huang Ti, who, around 2600 B.C., set out to write an authoritative medical and anatomical text (Nei Ch'ing , or Canon of Medicine) . As is evident from this passage—quoted in Early History of Human Anatomy —there are places where Huang is, through no fault of his own, rather clearly winging it:
    The heart is a king, who rules over all organs
    of the body; the lungs are his executive, who
    carry out his orders; the liver is his
    commandant, who keeps up the discipline; the
    gall bladder, his attorney general… and the
    spleen, his steward who supervises the five
    tastes. There are three burning spaces—the
    thorax, the abdomen and the pelvis—which are
    together responsible for the sewage system of
    the body.
    To Huang Ti's credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that "the blood of the body is under the control of the heart" and that "the blood current flows in a continuous circle and never stops." In other words, the man figured out what William Harvey figured out, four thousand years before Harvey and without laying open any family members.
    Imperial Rome gives us another nice example of what happens to medicine when the government frowns on human dissection. Galen, one of history's most revered anatomists, whose texts went unchallenged for centuries, never once dissected a human cadaver. In his post as surgeon to the gladiators, he had a frequent, if piecemeal, window on the human interior in the form of gaping sword wounds and lion claw lacerations.
    He also dissected a good sum of animals, preferably apes, which he believed to be anatomically identical to humans, especially, he maintained, if the ape had a round face. The great Renaissance anatomist Vesalius later pointed out that there are two hundred anatomical differences between apes and humans in skeletal structure alone.
    (Whatever Galen's shortcomings as a comparative anatomist, the man is to be respected for his ingenuity, for procuring apes in ancient Rome can't have been easy.) He got a lot right, it's just that he also got a fair amount wrong. His drawings showed five-lobed livers and hearts with three ventricles.
    The ancient Greeks were similarly adrift when it came to human anatomy. Like Galen, Hippocrates never dissected a human cadaver—he called dissection "unpleasant if not cruel." According to the book Early History of Human Anatomy , Hippocrates referred to tendons as "nerves"
    and believed the human brain to be a mucus-secreting gland. Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc, F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G." Who knows, perhaps history erred in bestowing upon Hippocrates the title Father of Medicine.
    Perhaps T.V.N. Persaud is the Father of Medicine.
    It's no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection. Though human dissection was an accepted practice in the Renaissance-era anatomy class, most professors shied away from personally undertaking it, preferring to deliver their lectures while seated in raised chairs a safe and tidy remove from the corpse and pointing out structures with a wooden stick while a hired hand did the slicing.
    Vesalius disapproved of this practice, and wasn't shy about