Carlino 1999

Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999)

quodlibetarian model:

academic theatre, in which someone discourses on a dissection with others watching

title page woodcuts in 15-16c editions of Mondino dei Liuzzi's Anatomie showing dissections: lector (holding book or standing above body, pointing), sector (dissector), ostensor (translating text into vernacular, indicating body parts to sector) and cadaver (12-9)

• prominence of book in lector's hands increases with time
• "scission between the theoretical activity of the physician-anatomist and the practical example directed toward an empirical examination of the cadaver" (19)
• despite text's emphasis on actual dissections, it repeats some mistakes of Galen and Avicenna, showing that "the anatomy lesson ... turns out to be little more than a ritual to celebrate the ancient classical authorities on the subject thruogh a reading of their texts" (20)
• "person of the physician anatomist ... becomes merely a student of texts" and "the dissection of the cadaver by the sector becomes a ritualized exercise void of any significant investigative aim" (20)
• dichotomy between theory and practice

title page of Galen's De anatomicis administrationibus, ParisL Simon de Colines, 1531, shows a change in this model; students rummage in the innards of the cadaver, becoming manually dexterous practitioners of dissection

Vesalius changes this

"By directly observing the cadaver and through his possession of a profound knowledge of earlier anatomical literature, Vesalius was able to confirm, discuss, and correct everything that had been said previously about the different parts of the body. He often entered into open controversy with those who fiercely defended a still vigorous Galenic tradition. His repeated references to dissections he had performed provide what the author himself suggested was the major feature of the Vesalian revolution as later defined by historians. These developments, crucial to both the textual and technical nature of the anatomical discipline, were tied to a series of insights related to the book trade, which make this publishing venture by Vesalius and Oporinus one of the most important and astute successes of the first century of printing. One of Vesalius's greatest merits lay in the fact that he was the first to have understood and exploited this still novel method of expressing and communicating knowledge to its full potential. The publication of the Epitomi, the use of splendid and detailed illustrations as visual aids, the technique of relating text to images, the subdivisions into books, chapters and paragraphs, the illuminated initials that open each of these sections, the title page and portrait of the author -- each of these features was thought out and realized by Vesalius, and his collaborators, as n aspect of the whole enterprise; this kind of integral arrangement had no real precedent in previous publications and conventions and often openly clashed with them. The Fabrica gives a newfound coherence to preexisting material. The so-called Vesalian revolution was probably nothing but a transformation of the forms and ways of using certain tools (dissection and printing, to mention only the most obvious) and of already acquired knowledge." (39-40)