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FIG. 9. THE OLDEST KNOWN PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION OF A FORMAL DISSECTION OF THE HUMAN BODY.
The original, which is in the library of the University of Montpellier,
France, appears in a manuscript copy of Guy de Chauliac's Chirurgia magna
(fourteenth century). Eugen Holländer of Berlin, the author of Die Medizin
in der klassischen Malerei, has courteously given permission to copy the
reproduction. The many defects which appear in this picture are due to the
fact that the reproduction was taken directly from the original miniature,
now six hundred years old. Holländer gives the following description of
this interesting scene:
"In one of the rooms of the hospital a woman's dead body is lying
upon a table. Alongside the bed in which she died a nun is praying
for her soul. Two physicians are busily engaged in the work of dissecting
the body. An instructor is reading out of a book, for the
benefit of the students who are crowding into the room, such portions
of the text as apply to the case in hand, and at the same time
he is directing their attention to the uterus which one of the dissectors
is lifting out of the abdominal cavity. Owing to the defective
state of the original miniature it is not possible to state positively
what part the three women who stand near the head of the corpse
are taking in the scene, but it is not unlikely that they too are physicians,
especially as their presence on such an occasion would be quite
in harmony with the customs of that period of time."
