tually
did, and have, when it suited their purpose, insisted that this first
author of a dissector's manual did but the three or four dissections
explicitly mentioned. Those who are more familiar with the history of
medicine, and especially of anatomy, are persuaded that he must have
done many. In the first class of writers is Prof. White, for instance,
who declares positively that Mondino did not dissect more bodies than
those of which we have absolute records. According to his emphatically
expressed opinion, the reason why the father of dissection did not
dissect more was because of ecclesiastical opposition. Even these few
dissections were due to some favoring chance or the laxity of the
ecclesiastical authorities, or Mondino might have paid dear for his
audacity. No one else, according to Prof. White, dared to encounter
the awful penalties that might have been inflicted on Mondino until
Vesalius, more than two centuries later, broke through "the
ecclesiastical barrier" and gave liberty to anatomists. Prof. Lewis S.
Pilcher, of Brooklyn, who has made a special study of Mondino and his
times, who has consulted that author's original editions, who has
searched out the traditions with regard to him in the very scene of
his labors in Bologna, thinks quite differently. Prof. White has a
purpose, that of minimizing the work done in anatomy during the
fourteenth century; Prof. Pilcher's only purpose is to bring out the
truth with regard to the history of {40} anatomy. In the Medical
Library and Historical Journal for December, 1906, Prof. Pilcher has
an article entitled The Mondino Myth, by which term he designates the
idea that Mondino dissected but a few bodies. He says with regard to
this subject:

"The changes have been rung by medical historians upon a casual
reference in Mondino's chapter on the uterus to the bodies of two
women and one sow which he had dissected, as if these were the first
and the only cadavers dissected by him. The context involved no such
construction. He is enforcing a statement that the size of the
uterus may vary, and to illustrate it remarks that, 'a woman whom I
anatomized in the month of January last year (1315 Anno Christi),
had a larger uterus than one whom I anatomized in the month of March
of the same year.' And further, he says, 'the uterus of a sow which
I dissected in 1316 (the year in which he was writing) was a hundred
times greater than any I had seen in the h