he University of
Bologna for proof of Taddeo's familiarity with dissection. Von Toeply
does not think that {68} this quotation is enough absolutely to prove
that Taddeo had done dissections, yet it would be hard to understand
it unless some such interpretation is made. Taddeo was asked to decide
a medico-legal question with regard to a pregnant woman. He refused,
however, with a modesty that might well be commended to medico-legal
experts of more modern times, to answer the question decisively,
because he had never made a dissection of a pregnant woman. Sarti
argues that it is evident from this that he had dissected other bodies
more easy to obtain than those of pregnant women, or else that he had
had the opportunity to make observations on them when dissected by
others.

[Footnote 8: Medici Compendio Storico Della Scuola Anatomica de
Bologna, Bologna, 1857. ]

Certain of Taddeo's contemporaries must have had the incentive of his
example to help them to a knowledge of human anatomy, for they surely
could not have accomplished all that they did in surgery without
experience in dissection, yet Taddeo was looked up to as a master by
all of them.

Anyone who has read the contributions to surgery of William of Salicet
and his great pupil Lanfranc, even if only what we give with regard to
them in our chapter on Surgery during the Middle Ages, cannot but be
impressed with the idea that they must have done human dissections.
They do not mention this fact explicitly, but portions of their
surgical works are taken up with the consideration of applied anatomy.
They discuss the relations of various structures to one another,
especially with reference to the surgery of them. Von Toeply, in his
Studies on the History of Anatomy in the Middle Ages, says that the
anatomies written before William's chapters on applied anatomy, were
most of them purely theoretic discussions meant to be guides for
internal {69} medicine, or else they were very short directions for
those who undertook the practical work of the dismemberment of bodies,
usually, however, with reference to animals rather than to human
bodies. In William of Salicet we encounter, he says, for the first
time a treatise on anatomy made with the deliberate purpose of its
application to practical surgery. Everywhere William gives hints for
surgical operations with special reference to the anatomical
relations.

Puccinotti quotes from William of Salicet's surgery, written abou