aled to court for
body-snatching for anatomical purposes, and about this time there was,
according to Rashdall in his History of the Universities, a statute of
the University of Bologna which required the teacher in anatomy to
dissect a body, if the students brought it to him. More than ten years
earlier than this, that is, {38} within ten years after the supposed
Papal prohibition, there are records of dissections having been made
at Venice in public, for the benefit of the doctors of the city, at
the expense of the municipal treasury. During the first half of this
century money was allowed at Bologna for wine, to be given to those
who attended the public dissections, and if we recall the state in
which the bodies must have been at a time when the use of
preservatives was unknown, we can well understand the need for it. All
this shows, as I have said, that the date of Boniface's bull (1300),
far from representing the eclipse of anatomy, actually fixes the date
of the dawn of modern practical anatomical study.

The most interesting question in this whole discussion is as to how
much dissection Mondino actually did during the second decade of the
fourteenth century. His book became the manual of dissection that was
in practically every dissector's hands for several centuries after.
Probably no book of its kind has ever been more used, and none
maintained its place as the standard work in this department for so
long. No less than 25 printed editions of it appeared altogether. It
would seem to be utterly improbable that the author of a text-book of
this kind could have made only a few dissections. There are a number
of historians who have claimed, nevertheless, that at most he did not
dissect more than three or four bodies. This is all that we have
absolute evidence for, that is to say, only these dissections are
recorded. It is easy to understand, however, that a professor of
anatomy might make even hundreds of dissections, and yet have
something to say only about a very few which happened to present some
special peculiarities. The absence of further records may readily be
accounted for also in {39} other ways. The art of printing was not yet
invented; paper had only just been discovered and was extremely
expensive, and many factors conspired to destroy any records that may
have been made.

Outsiders dipping into the history of medicine have made much of our
paucity of documentary evidence with regard to what Mondino ac