ANATOMY AND ART. 
419 
terest was dug up in Rome in the grounds of the Villa of 
Musa, who was physician to the Emperor Augustus. It is a 
human torso, but the front of the chest and abdomen has 
been removed so as to expose the viscera. The heart is sit¬ 
uated in the very center of the thorax, and is vertical in po¬ 
sition. It exactly corresponds to the heart described by 
Galen, but which we know was studied on the ape. The 
lungs have three lobes on the left and two on the right. 
The chest is human, but the contents simian. It is prob¬ 
able that this curious figure was constructed for teaching 
purposes, and the crudity of the carving would correspond 
to the time assigned to it, long before the appearance of 
Galen’s work. 
A huge gap has to be surmounted at a bound from the 
time of these relics of classic art to the period when the in¬ 
vention of printing gave a marvelous impetus to the study 
of anatomy. Some of the earliest sources of illustration for 
anatomical teaching were nielli. The beautiful work known 
as niello —an Italian word equivalent to the Latin niger, or 
black—was produced by melting a black amalgam into the 
etchings on a metal plate, generally silver, which was after¬ 
ward highly polished. The most delicate tracing that the 
instrument of the engraver could produce became perma¬ 
nently black and formed an exquisite contrast to the lus¬ 
trous silver which it adorned. “ Rubbings,” as we should 
term them, were obtained from nielli exhibiting nude fig¬ 
ures which were made use of by the early teachers to illus¬ 
trate their lessons on the form of the human body. 
With the invention of carving on wooden blocks and en¬ 
graving upon copper plates anatomical drawings began to 
assume book form. Among the earliest of which we have 
any knowledge are two quaint woodcuts in the Fasciculus 
Medicinse of John Ketam, a German physician, whose work 
was published in 1491. 
In the 14th and 15th centuries a lesson of anatomy on 
the cadaver was an event of such great rarity and impor¬ 
tance that it was announced throughout the university 
55—Bull Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 12. 
