The claim that the Medieval Church “banned dissection” and so set back progress in the study of human anatomy is often made in popular sources. It is also regularly found in academic sources by medical experts commenting on the history of anatomy. So, unsurprisingly, it is often produced by anti-theists as evidence that Christianity retarded scientific knowledge for religious reasons. This is despite the fact there was no such “ban” and that the practice of anatomical dissection that founded the modern study of anatomy actually began in medieval schools of medicine.

The Claims

As discussed here many times, anti-theistic conceptions of history lean heavily on the nineteenth century Conflict Thesis – the idea that science and religion have been at war down the ages, with religion constantly restricting and retarding the progress of science and science struggling against superstition and unreason to advance human knowledge. Historians of science have long since rejected this thesis, but it pervades most popular conceptions of history and elements of it continue to be accepted as unalloyed and unquestioned fact.

As a result, the claim that the Church “banned human dissection” and thus stalled our understanding of human anatomy for centuries is regularly repeated. So people on TikTok are assured this was the case by a history teacher on his channel “History with Mr Atkinson”:

“Mr Atkinson” has 183,000 followers. His little video, consisting of the claim in the shot above and him shaking his head with music in the background, encapsulates the main claim made about the Church and dissection. According to this story, the ancients did some human dissection, but it was banned with the coming of Christianity. The Catholic Church favoured the anatomy of Galen (129-c.216) because his ideas about humans having souls were compatible with Christianity. So they forbade any dissection because Galen was considered the last word in anatomy and so was not to be questioned and because their religious beliefs about the coming resurrection of the dead meant bodies had to be left intact. But they were defied by the Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who undertook dissections and showed where Galen was wrong, with his work marking the beginning of modern scientific anatomy.

This neat story fits many modern prejudices and preconceptions and so it gets repeated as fact without question. Thus an online summary of medicine in the Renaissance blithely presents it uncritically, declaring “the Church had banned dissection, believing that it subtracted from the dignity of the deceased, who should be buried whole”. Oddly, they illustrate this “ban” by reference to Galen, saying “for example, Galen ….never dissected a human, only animals so, while his work was valuable, it was also incorrect and did not take into account the nuances of human anatomy”, despite the fact Galen was a pagan and died a full century before Christianity was in a position to ban anything at all. The same article is also happy to indulge in some lurid fantasy, claiming that later “the church allowed the dissection of criminals and blasphemers although, gruesomely, these criminals were sometimes still alive when dissections occurred and the audience watched and learned.” This is nonsense, but in keeping with the general weird tenor of the article.

Unfortunately it is not just popular pieces that repeat this claim. Academic articles also do so, though these tend to be ones by anatomists summarising the history of their field, not by historians. So in a short piece in an anatomy journal, Rodrigo E. Elizondo-Omaña, Santos Guzmán-López and María De Los Angeles García-Rodríguez assure their readers that in the Middle Ages “all that related to ‘material’ things was considered to be of little importance. Because material things are temporary, the human body was not studied”. They then declare categorically “Anatomical dissection was considered to be blasphemous and so was prohibited (Gregory and Cole, 2002)” (“Dissection as a teaching tool: Past, present, and future”, The Anatomical Record, Volume 285B, Issue 1, July 2005, pp. 11-15). Their citation for the claim that dissection was “considered blasphemous” and so “was prohibited” is S. Ryan Gregory and Thomas R. Cole, “The Changing Role of Dissection in Medical Education” (Journal of the American Medical Association, 2002; 287(9) pp. 1180–1181), which sounds authoritative until you check the citation and find Gregory and Cole are also anatomists rather than historians and they simply assert “anatomical dissection, in particular, was culturally construed as desecration and thus prohibited”, with no evidence or citation to back up this claim. Similarly, another modern anatomist, Sanjib Kumar Ghosh, plays historian in his article “Human cadaveric dissection: a historical account from ancient Greece to the modern era” (Anatomy and Cell Biology, 2015 Sep;48(3), pp. 153-69 and makes the same claims.

Ghosh’s article is more detailed than the two noted above and rather more strident in its assertions. He gives a summary of ancient human dissection done by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335-280 BC) and Erasistratus of Ceos (c. 304-c. 250 BC), then notes that their methodology was later overshadowed by ancient schools of thought that shunned dissection. He then declares “the flickering light of human dissection was completely snuffed out with the burning of Alexandria in 389 AD”. His citation for this statement is yet another article by a non-historian (Egyptian gynaecologist H. N. Sallam) in yet another medical journal, and seems to refer to the myth of “the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria”, which should begin to ring warning bells about the depth and nature of Ghosh’s grasp of history (see The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria for details).

Like his fellow anatomists, Ghosh is very sure that the Church was the villain in the subsequent story:

Following widespread introduction of Christianity in Europe during the Middle Ages, the development of rational thought and investigation was paralysed by the church authorities and physicians could only repeat the works of the eminent figures from past such as Aristotle or Galen, without questioning their scientific validity. During this period, human dissection was considered to be blasphemous and so was prohibited. For hundreds of years, the European world valued the sanctity of the church more than scientific quest and it was not until early 14th century that human dissection was revived as a tool for teaching anatomy in Bologna, Italy after a hiatus of over 1,700 years.

His claim that no-one was allowed to question Aristotle or Galen on matters anatomical is backed by a reference to yet two more non-historians, this time anatomists Alexandra Mavrodi and George Paraskevas, and their article “Mondino de Luzzi: a luminous figure in the darkness of the Middle Ages” (Croatian Medical Journal, 2014, Feb; 55(1), pp.50-3). The title of that one alone indicates some antiquated conceptions of history and, unsurprisingly, the article does not support the claim with evidence. Similarly Ghosh’s claim that dissection “was considered to be blasphemous and so was prohibited” has a reference to the same JAMA article by Gregory and Cole referred to above and so is also not substantiated by any actual evidence. These anatomists essentially all repeat the same claims and then cite each other in support. As history, this is appallingly bad stuff.

So it is hardly surprising that some anti-theists latch onto these claims and cite scholarly-seeming assertions by these learned non-historians in support. A few years ago a blogger who goes by the handle “im-skeptical” poured scorn on the idea that the Middle Ages could be anything other than the superstitious and benighted “Dark Age” of neo-atheist imagining and took issue with my detailed and favourable review of James Hannam’s excellent popularisation of modern conceptions of medieval natural philosophy and proto-science,  God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (2009). When I took “Skep” to task over this in a debunking of his claims about the Middle Ages (see “‘The Dark Ages’ – Popery, Periodisation and Pejoratives”) our “Skep” fought a frantic rear-guard action in defence of the “Conflict Thesis” and his dusty conception of medieval history. In particular, he objected to my noting that the period saw various advances including “the beginnings of anatomy based on dissection”. Thus he frantically sought to prop up the idea that “the Church banned dissection” and did so – of course – by citing Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918).

The “Conflict Thesis” is also known as the “Draper-White Thesis” because White, along with John William Draper (1811-1882), is the nineteenth century polemicist whose work fixed the idea of a constant warfare between science and religion in the popular imagination (see my interview with David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu on the background to White and Draper and the persistence of their claims). White’s notorious book History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) is the point of origin for most of the claims made above about the Church and dissection.

White condemns “the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead” as an obstacle to the advance of medicine and says this was an idea “which the Church cherished as peculiarly its own”, despite noting that it had been “inherited from the old pagan civilizations”. Brushing that detail aside, White declares:

… hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic ideas–the recognition of the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in similar terms.

(White, Warfare, Ch. XIII)

White adds that the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body and a prohibition on the shedding of blood added to the impetus against dissection, though he notes wryly on that last point that “of all organizations in human history the Church of Rome has caused the greatest spilling of innocent blood”. So it was on that basis, White claims, that the Church made proclamations that effectively banned dissection:

On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the end of the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all; for then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains it was desired to carry back to their own country.

The “consequences” of this, according to White, was that dissection was banned and medicine forbidden to the most learned classes:

[This decretal] soon came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries; it was the worst blow they ever received, for it impressed upon the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is sacrilege, and led to ecclesiastical mandates withdrawing from the healing art the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the Middle Ages and giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic charlatans.

It is only after centuries of ecclesiastically-imposed stagnation that anatomy and medicine are rescued from this obscurantism by one of the heroes of White’s story, Andreas Vesalius:

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church for ages. As we have seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII was universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as threatening excommunication against those practising it. Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession, and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid modern foundations–on careful examination and observation of the human body: this was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater.

(White, Warfare, Ch. IX)

So White tells a neat and compelling story whereby the Church discourages and then bans dissection and it is only thanks to the brave defiance of Vesalius – “braving the fires of the Inquisition”, no less – that anatomy was saved from the wicked Catholic Church. And this is the story we find echoed in the papers by the modern anatomists mentioned above and by many atheist polemicists. This is despite the fact this story is essentially nonsense.

The Reality

Like most of the historical myths that we can blame on White, he cobbled this one together from bits and pieces of actual history. So it is certainly true that the “old pagan civilizations” had an abhorrence of meddling with dead bodies. This was based in part on Greco-Roman taboos that saw corpses as polluting, as well as social conventions that meant the bodies of loved ones should be treated with respect and given proper funerary rites. This gave ancient executions that involved public mutilation and particularly crucifixion (with its long exposure of the dead victim and unceremonious disposal of the corpse afterward) a special horror for the ancients. For a detailed analysis of ancient Greek and Roman attitudes to dead bodies and their relevance to ancient anatomical study, see Heinrich von Staden. “The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and its Cultural Context in Ancient Greece”, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 65, (1992) , pp. 233-241)

All this said, these taboos did not mean there were no dissections at all in the ancient world, just they were very rare and very much the exception to the rule. As already mentioned, in second century BC Alexandria, Herophilus and Erasistratus undertook systematic dissections and later anatomists, including Galen, benefited from their insights. It could be that Ptolemaic society, which had inherited the complex embalming and funerary traditions of ancient Egyptian culture, did not have the same reticence around cutting up dead bodies as the rest of their Mediterranean contemporaries. Whatever the reason for this exception to the Greco-Roman rule, after Herophilus’ time ancient anatomy turned away from this rather “hands on” approach and became increasingly theoretical rather than empirical.

Galen did undertake dissections, but seems to have used mainly dogs, apes and pigs as stand-ins for humans. Pigs, in particular, were considered highly anatomically analogous to humans and so sufficient for the purpose. Despite the limitations imposed by his subjects, a combination of these dissections and his work as a surgeon for gladiators meant he made many very acute and useful observations. He was a pioneer in research into the spine and nervous system in particular and was able to differentiate between motor and sensory nerves. He also undertook neuroanatomical experiments on pigs; severing their spine at different points and noting the various affects this had on the (unfortunate) animal.

Galen’s work was so comprehensive and so highly regarded that his school of medicine came to dominate in Late Antiquity and he came to be seen as the last word on anatomy in the Later Roman Empire and among Byzantine scholars. Like many technical works in Greek, his books were lost in the Latin West thanks to the turmoil of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its aftermath. From the fifth to the eleventh century available Latin scholarship on anatomy was scanty and highly general and Galen was known only through passing references.

So the rudimentary knowledge of anatomy in the Early Medieval Period was not due to some kind of Church disapproval of studying the human body, but simply because it was one of a large number of technical disciplines and areas of learning that was set back by the dramatic loss of relevant source texts in several centuries of political turmoil and economic decline. Learning always suffers in such periods. White singles out Tertullian and Augustine as evidence for some supposed Christian distaste for anatomy generally, but they are from the second century and the fifth century respectively – White is unable to claim any such expressions of disapproval in the early medieval period or even anyone citing Tertullian or Augustine on the matter, despite them being highly influential Patristic authorities.

If we turn to what Tertullian actually says, we find no condemnation of dissection per se, just a note on its limitations:

There is that Herophilus, the well-known surgeon, or (as I may almost call him) butcher, who cut up no end of persons, in order to investigate the secrets of nature, who ruthlessly handled human creatures to discover (their form and make): I have my doubts whether he succeeded in clearly exploring all the internal parts of their structure, since death itself changes and disturbs the natural functions of life, especially when the death is not a natural one, but such as must cause irregularity and error amidst the very processes of dissection.

(On the Soul, Ch. 10)

The passing reference to Herophilus as a “butcher” seems to be in reference to the idea that both Herophilus and Erasistratus not only undertook dissections, but also vivisections – cutting up living human subjects. This claim was also made by Aulus Cornelius Celsus (25 BC – 50 AD) in what is a quite approving comment:

Consequently, it is necessary to dissect dead bodies and examine their viscera and intestines. Herophilus and Erasistratus adopted the best method. They dissected criminals, received from the kings out of prison, and contemplated even while the breath still remained those things that nature had before concealed.

(De Medicina, Prologue)

There is still a debate about whether this claim of vivisection was true, but it certainly seems the reason for Tertullian’s “butcher” aside rather than some disapproval of anatomy in general or dissection in particular. White, of course, neglects all this context.

The passage from Augustine that White appears to be referring to does not, read in context, seem to be about dissection or anatomy at all. At least, not unless it is read with a reductive literalism. In his Confessions, Augustine is discussing temptations via the senses and argues that even when using the senses in pursuit of knowledge the senses can lead people astray:

For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which lies in the gratification of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves “who are far from you perish”, there pertains to the soul, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious longing, cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning, not of having pleasure in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh. This longing, since it originates in an appetite for knowledge, and the sight being the chief among the senses in the acquisition of knowledge, is called in divine language, the lust of the eyes. (1 John 2:16)

(Confessions, X.35)

There is no good reason to think this reference to “making experiments through the flesh” is meant literally and refers to the study of anatomy or dissection. In the next paragraph he asks “what pleasure is there to see, in a lacerated corpse, that which makes you shudder?” But he goes on to note “And yet if it lie near, we flock there, to be made sad, and to turn pale” and compares this to “those strange sights exhibited in the theatre”. He is warning about a curiosity for the strange and even the horrific, “cloaked under the name of knowledge” – much like modern onlookers who have a compulsion to look at the victims of a car crash. There is nothing here to indicate he is condemning dissection or anatomy. And, again, there is no citation of this passage by any medieval writers using it to make such a condemnation.

And medieval scholars did seem to have a great curiosity about anatomy, judging from the reception for Galen’s works when they finally became available in Latin translation in the early twelfth century. The influx of lost ancient knowledge – first via Arabic translations through Spain and Sicily and then directly from Greek via Byzantium – spurred the Twelfth Century Renaissance. And Galen and his Arabic commentators and heirs, such as Avicenna, Haly Abbas, Rhazes and Averroes, were all eagerly received and widely copied.

Unsurprisingly, just as Galenic medicine had come to dominate the Late Roman Era, it had similarly dominated Muslim medical thinking and so hugely influenced medieval medicine. But the claim that no European scholar could question Galen thanks to some prohibition by the Church is pure fantasy. Galen dominated purely because his work seemed so comprehensive and because what observation and experiment was available at the time seemed to confirm what he said. So he was largely taken as authoritative. That said, several of these medieval doctors and anatomists did question and reject elements of Galen based on their own observations. The idea that no-one did this before Vesalius is simply wrong.

So what about White’s claims of explicit bans or restrictions that effectively quashed dissection in the Middle Ages? He declares that “one of the main objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical studies was the maxim that ‘the Church abhors the shedding of blood.'” – a concept that the vehemently anti-Catholic White found richly ironic. He does not give a citation for this “maxim”, but he places it in quote marks because he seems sure it existed at the time. Unfortunately for White, it seems no such maxim existed. Careful detective work by both historian C.H. Talbot and classicist Darrell Amundsen has, separately, been completely unable to find any medieval work that uses this phrase or its often-quoted Latin form “Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine“. The furthest back anyone can trace the phrase is to a work by the French surgeon François Quesnay (1692-1774), who took it from a book by the historian Étienne Pasquier (1529-1615). It turns out the phrase was original to Pasquier, that Quesnay mistook it for a phrase from the Middle Ages and put it in quotes and it was read that way by everyone between Quesnay and White. Talbot calls White’s ironic so-called “maxim” a “literary ghost” (see C. H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England, 1967, p. 55, and Darrell Amundsen, “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 52, no. 1, 1978, pp. 22-44).

Amundsen’s article also seeks to unravel the truth behind the assertion made by White, and repeated endlessly since, that “in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery to monks” and that this and other such bans and restrictions meant “the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the Middle Ages [gave] up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic charlatans”. Amundsen notes the great variety of claims made along these lines, with the dates of the ban in question, the councils or synods involved and exactly which clergy were affected varying widely. These variations and contradictions alone should indicate that there is something amiss here.

After careful examination of a range of local and general rulings about restrictions on various kinds of clergy regarding the practice of “secular” professions like law and medicine, Amundsen concludes that only certain kinds of clergy were restricted – largely “regular clergy” (i.e. monks and canons who lived under monastic rules and were meant to live separate from the secular world) and clergy under “higher orders” (i.e. sub-deacons, deacons and priests, who could not risk being responsible for the death of a patient through surgery). This left a plethora of non-regular, lower order clergy who definitely could study and practice medicine. Given that most medieval university students and lecturers fell into that broad category, the restrictions were nowhere near as total and as devastating as White makes out. And that leaves aside how much practice fitted with theory when it came to these proclamations. Amundsen concludes:

It is evident that these regulations cannot be legitimately used to support the broad statements made to the effect that clerics were forbidden to practice medicine and surgery.

(Amundsen, p. 43)

This leaves us with White’s claim that Pope Boniface VIII “issued a decretal forbidding …. the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead” and that this “came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries; …. for it impressed upon the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is sacrilege”. Here White is referring to the 1299 Papal bull  Detestande feritatis (also known as De Sepulturis), which he correctly notes did not refer to dissection but rather to the practice of boiling down the bodies of people who had died overseas, for example on campaign or crusade, so their bones can be easily transported home for burial. White claims that this bull had the effect of stopping dissections as well. But the problem with this claim is that this bull was proclaimed at around the time that, in fact, dissections began to be revived for the study of anatomy in medieval schools of medicine in Italy. So clearly White’s polemic has, yet again, badly distorted the picture.

Medieval Dissection and the Birth of Modern Anatomy

The taboos held by the Greeks and Romans about meddling with dead bodies decreased under the influence of Christianity for a number of reasons. To begin with, the religious ideas at the heart of these concerns weakened as paganism gave way to the new faith. Secondly, Christian theology placed greater emphasis on the spiritual over the physical, which weakened many ideas about the malign properties of human remains. Finally, the Christian cult of martyrs and saints and the projection of their sanctity onto relics of the saintly person after their death, including their bones or other physical remains, led to a focus on such artefacts as holy and powerful rather than objects of dread and fear.

This change in thinking about human remains developed over time and spread beyond the sphere of saints cults. Kings, nobles and even lower ranked people, once dead, were often embalmed, preserved or divided into pieces for burial at several sites of significance to them and their families. This practice was more common and more accepted in some parts of medieval Europe than in others and attitudes to it varied from full acceptance to abhorrence. The 1299 bull of Boniface VIII cited by White is just one reaction to this kind of practice.

By the thirteenth century we begin to get records of another practice involving the cutting up of corpses. With the increasing spread of legal practice based on ancient Roman models and law, we see judicial autopsies gaining legal status, with the testimony of expert physicians appearing in legal cases. Bologna University was a key centre of this revolution in medieval legal practice and this city is one place where we see these autopsies become more common. So it is probably no coincidence that it is in Bologna’s medical schools by the late thirteenth century that we see the revival of dissections for the purposes of anatomical instruction.

Far from stifling this practice, the earlier stimulus to anatomy provided by the rediscovery of Galen and his Arabic commentators saw rising interest in questions of anatomy. The medical school of Salerno had held dissections of pigs and, perhaps, human cadavers as early as the twelfth century, but it was Bologna that saw the first well-documented human dissections in the thirteenth century. The Chirurgia of the surgeon William of Saliceto (1275) was a product of these Bolognese dissections. Mondino of Luzzi (c. 1275-1326) became professor at Bologna and began regular dissections which formed the basis of his Anatomia, which was the most popular and influential work on anatomy until Vesalius’ time, two centuries later. In the fourteenth century regular dissections were carried out at a number of centres of study in northern Italy and parts of France, eventually spreading to northern Europe by the later fifteenth century.

Contrary to the claims noted above, there was no forbidding of any correction of Galen and Aristotle. Some of these medieval anatomists observed and recorded ways in which their findings differed from these ancient authorities, but at this stage dissection was more for instruction and elucidation of the ancient texts rather than critical analysis of them – much as modern medical students do dissections today. Differences would usually be put down to an anomaly in the specimen rather than an error on the part of the ancient authority. But these medieval anatomists lay the technical foundations for the more revolutionary work that was to follow in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The question then has to be asked, if these autopsies and dissections were occurring both before and directly after the papal bull of 1299 that, according to White, retarded this kind of activity, what can we make of White’s claim? Katherine Park’s careful work on this issue shows that the bull Detestande feritatis / De Sepulturis does seem to have some effect on willingness to undertake dissections, but notes geographical differences:

[T]he bull seems to have been understood more expansively by some anatomists active in northern Eurpe, who interpreted it as categorically forbidding dissection or as forbidding dissection without a papal dispensation. Others, such as the great fourteenth-century French surgeon Guy de Chauliac (ca. 1290-ca. 1367/70), showed no hesitation about dissection at all. Crucially, avoidance of dissection seems to have reflected preemptive caution on the part of anatomists rather than actual ecclesiastical pressure: I know of no case in which an anatomist was ever prosecuted for dissecting a human cadaver and no case in which the church ever rejected a request for a dispensation to dissect. Certainly, there is no convincing evidence that Vesalius ran afoul of church authorities two centuries later.

(Park, “Myth 5 – That the Medieval Church Prohibited Human Dissection” in R.S. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, Harvard, 2009, pp. 43-49, p. 45)

In an earlier paper Park examines the reasons for the faster adoption of dissection in Italy and southern France compared to northern Europe and attributes this to differing cultural views about dead bodies. She concludes that “the Italians envisaged physical death as a quick and radical separation of body and soul”, whereas northern European culture saw it as a far more gradual process of division, taking place over a year or more as the body decomposed and transitioned to a skeleton (see Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences , 1995, Vol.50(1), p.111-132, p. 111). So it appears that the differences in how northern and southern Europe responded to the revival of dissection had a cultural and social basis rather than one imposed by the Church. Similarly, restrictions and limits on access to cadavers for dissections, which often made regular dissections difficult to stage, were due more to secular authorities placing barriers on who could and could not be dissected than any ecclesiastical restrictions.

So White is wrong. Every one of his claims is at best misleading and at worst basically nonsense. And if we trace back the claims made with such assurance by Ghosh, Elizondo-Omaña et. al. or Gregory and Cole and repeated by various online polemicists, they all lead back to White. Unfortunately, the efforts at correction by actual historians like Talbot, Amundsen and Park seem to do little to dent this persistent myth. In one popular article Park admits a certain level of despair:

Every time I read something in The New York Times that Leonardo da Vinci had to hide the fact that he was doing dissection, and every time I listen to a tour guide in Italy tell these stories, it just kills me. I don’t know how to get rid of this myth.

(Debunking a Myth – The Harvard Gazette)

But as with all historical myths, the only way this one can be quashed is by those who know the real evidence debunking it every time it rears its head. There is no other remedy for nonsense.

Further Reading

Darrell Amundsen, “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 52, no. 1, 1978, pp. 22-44

A.C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: Science in the Middle Ages 5th-13th Century (Mercury, 1961)

David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World, (Oxford, 2022)

David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago, 1992)

R.S. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, (Harvard, 2009)

Katherine Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences , 1995, Vol.50(1), p.111-132

Heinrich von Staden. “The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and its Cultural Context in Ancient Greece”, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 65, (1992) , pp. 233-241

C. H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England, (Oldbourne,1967)