[VII] 



ANATOMY IN THE MIDDLE AGES- 

 A.D. 400 to 1400 



A. The Role of the Church 



Xhe Middle Ages is defined as that period between the fall 

 of the Roman Empire and the revival of letters, roughly during 

 the chronological interval between A.D. 400 and 1400. The Dark 

 Age is usually applied to the earlier part of this era because 

 of its intellectual stagnation. 



As far as anatomy is concerned, the Middle Ages was char- 

 acterized by being a millennium in which little or no progress 

 was made. The genesis of this status was probably the deteriora- 

 tion and decline of the school of medicine at Alexandria. The two 

 great fires there in the 1st and 7th Centuries A.D. destroyed the 

 great collections of medical books which had been assembled. 

 Also militating against the advance of human anatomy, was the 

 prevailing psychology of the people and the hostility of the 

 fathers of the early Christian Church, the latter probably being 

 the more important since their standards had much to do with 

 influencing the thinking of the masses. Human dissection took 

 root in Italy in the 14th Century, for the first time since the 

 Alexandrian period, and from there spread to France and Ger- 

 many. It began and expanded slowly. The one thing that was 

 needed was legal permission to dissect human material and this 

 had to come from the all-powerful Church which was temporal 

 as well as ecclesiastical. The real authority in medical circles was 

 the writings of Galen, but these had to be rediscovered and trans 

 lated by the Arabians, particularly by Avicenna (A.D. 980-1037), 

 so they appeared late during the Middle Ages. 



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