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. Frontispiece to the first edition of Vesalius' Anatomy (1543), showing animals used in dissection, as well as the human body. "Dark Ages" had set in, and when, in A.D. 640, the vast treasures of the Alexandrian library were burned, night itself came on. So long and so deep has that night been in the very natal city of human anatomy that it is but six years since the death of Clot Bey, the first public lecturer on anatomy in Alexandria for about seventeen hundred years; and so strong are Mussulman prejudice and hatred, that, although under the protection of the Pasha Mehemet Ali, when he first opened the thorax of a body a student rushed upon him and stabbed him with a poniard. The blade slid over the ribs, and Clot Bey, perceiving that he was not seriously hurt, took a piece of plaster from his dressing-case, and, applying it to the wound, coolly observed to the class, "We were speaking, gentlemen, of the disposition of the ribs and sternum, and I now have the opportunity of showing how a blow directed from above has so little chance of penetrating the thorax," and went calmly on with his lecture.* The Mohammedans, into whose hands medicine passed at the fall of Alexandria, wholly abandoned dissection, and, as we have just seen, had even the fiercest prejudice against it, based on its prohibition by the Koran and the seven days' ceremonial uncleanness it denounced against all who even touched a dead body. Galen's anatomy of the ape reigned supreme till the time of Vesalius, in 1543. Even then the substitution of the lower animals for man was neither wholly nor easily overthrown. In Paris we find Sylvius, the teacher, and afterwards the fierce opponent of Vesalius as an innovator, lecturing "from small fragments of dogs." The ape was preferred by many on account of its outward resemblance to man, but swine were the favorites,‡ because, being omnivorous animals, they still more closely resembled the hu *Medical Times and Gaz., Sept. 9, 1868. † Morley's Life of Jerome Cardan, vol. ii, p. 100. |
