History and Progress of Comparative Anatomy. 29^ 



Italian school of anatomy may be dated. The celebrity of their, 

 teachers gave Bologna a degree of pre-eminence which she ^-» 

 tained for ages, and which was well supported by the talents of 

 Vesalius, Arantius, and Varoli. 



The appearance of Mondino and Berenger exercised a most 

 favourable influence on anatomy, both human and animal. Pre- 

 vious to their time, the practice of teachers was to deliver obscure, 

 unintelligible, and often imaginary accounts of the parts of tlie 

 human body, with commentaries on the descriptions of Galeya,. 

 and illustrations derived from the bodies of dogs, pigs, and 

 the common domestic animals. Even Berenger, as we have 

 seen, though professor at Bologna, is recorded to have delivered, 

 his first course of anatomy on the body of a pig, in the house 

 of Albert Pio, lord of Carpi. Of this unpropitious system of 

 instruction, the effect was to distort and misrepresent human 

 anatomy, while animal anatomy was cultivated on so Hmited a 

 scale, and with such perverted objects, that, instead of utility, it 

 was productive of much injury. By removing the superstitious 

 prejudice against dissecting human bodies, the true structure of 

 the human frame began to be better understood and more dili- 

 gently studied ; and curiosity prompted anatomists to enlarge 

 their conceptions of animal structure by the comparative inspec- 

 tion of the same organs in the lower animals. In this manner 

 Michael Angelo Buonarotti, the celebrated painter, dissected 

 both human and animal bodies, and compared the position and 

 relations of the muscles in both ; and^ at a subsequent period, 

 we shall find that Rondelet, Goiter, Aldrovandus, and Fabri- 

 cius ab Aquapendente, applied it in this manner with the happi- 

 est effects. 



In France, the prejudices against the dissection of the human 

 body were so strong, that although permission to dissect the hu- 

 man subject had been granted at Montpellier in 3376, there is no 

 proof that it had come into general use for more tlian a century 

 and a half after that period. It is, indeed, one of the charges of 

 Vepalius against Dubois, that a human body was never seen in 

 his theatre ; that the carcasses of dogs, and other animals, were 

 the materials from which he taught ; and that, unless Vesalius 

 and his fellow-students had assiduously collected human bones 

 from the Innocents and other cemeteries, they must have been un- 



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