lieved to haunt Sir Charles Bell's anatomical rooms, where she had been dissected alive on the night preceding that appointed for her marriage.* *See Gibson's Rambles in Europe, pp. 143-44. The poem does not follow the legend as to the dissection's being ante-mortem. In Hood's Whims and Oddities the title is "Mary's Ghost." Gibson wrongly entitles it the "Invisible Girl." I have given the original text, which differs slightly from Gibson's, and I add, also, Hood's original wood-cut. But the example of Alexandria in the cultivation of anatomy aroused no imitators-no rivals. For several centuries Egypt was the only medical centre of the world. Anatomists of every country resorted thither, and in the second century after Christ we find Galen compelled to go from Pergamus to Alexandria in order to see a skeleton. Even in Rome itself, and as court physician at a later period, Galen could dissect nothing but the lower animals. The burning of the dead by the Romans prohibited totally any attempt at anatomy, and, instead of sending his students to Egypt. to study anatomy, he sent them to Germany to dissect the slain among the national enemies, while he contented himself with the ape.* This feeble light at Rome and Alexandria, however, was soon extinguished, and human dissection disappeared from history for twelve centuries. The twilight of the well-named * Hyrtl, Lehrbuch der Anatomie des Menschen, 8te Auflage, Wien 1863, p. 230. William Hunter's Introductory Lectures, p. 24. |