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...anatomy. The annual, public anatomy demonstration, he explains, was a "most civil" event; it raised the "honor and fame" not only of his transalpine nation but of the entire university. (2) He then draws attention to private dissection as a necessary exercise in the study of "particulars." (3) While he goes on to lament that the public event was frequently postponed and the private exercises were too infrequently conducted, he characterizes the public anatomy demonstration in terms of civility, honor, and fame. This descriptive triad hints at the formality that would come to define the Paduan tradition of public anatomy and to distinguish it from its European and early modern counterparts.
Influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, current scholarship has emphasized the relationship between public anatomies and carnivalesque celebrations of corporeality. (4) Public anatomies, the story goes, were sites of disruption, raucous outburst, and bawdy display. These events revealed potentially subversive reactions to the death and violence that dissection would seem to demand. This account, now suspiciously universal, derives from the particular case of Bologna and the anatomical practices and procedures at its university. In her classic study, Giovanna Ferrari notes that in Bologna by the 1640s, the annual anatomy demonstration and the Carnival overlapped: both occurred in the winter months; more importantly, spectators came to the anatomy theater wearing carnival masks. (5) This conflation, Ferrari goes on to explain, was intentional: the administration was aware that fewer foreign students were coming to the university--matriculation levels were in decline, severely by 1640--and to advertise both the new anatomy theater (ca. 1638) and the institutional innovation it heralded, the administration promoted the association between the annual public anatomy and the Carnival. (6)
In Padua, however, the tradition of public anatomy evolved under a different set of circumstances. The number of foreign students did not begin to decline rapidly until the first decades of the seventeenth century, long after the anatomy theater was built and in regular use. (7) Stable matriculation patterns and the holding of the annual anatomy demonstration in the winter months before the Carnival began meant that professors, administrators, and students attached a different set of ideas to the anatomy theater: these were organized around the importance of natural philosophy and the civic recognition that the study of anatomy received. In Padua, the annual anatomy demonstration was not explicitly--or implicitly--linked to the annual events of the Carnival or to its ritualized celebration of the body. In the words of the student quoted above, it was a "most civil" event.
The Paduan tradition of anatomy was shaped by a number of factors: the clear distinction between public demonstrations and private dissections, as well as steady matriculation, institutional support, the research agenda, and the established reputation of the leading anatomist, Girolamo Fabrici (Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente, 1533-1619) and the construction of the permanent anatomy theater (1594-95). Each factor played a vital role in the evolution of the public anatomy demonstration and its intellectual and cultural import. This essay focuses on the research and pedagogical habits of Fabrici, and on the behavior required of medical students at the anatomy demonstration and, eventually, inside the anatomy theater. It shows first that the natural-philosophical impulses of Fabrici connected the study of anatomy to the wider pedagogical and humanist culture of the university; and, secondly, that the anatomy theater helped to endorse the codes of civility that permeated the late humanist environment of Renaissance Padua.
Fabrici understood anatomy as a domain of research, different from the practice and refinement of surgical techniques. His research developed the Aristotelian topics of motion, sensation, digestion, respiration, and generation. For example, inside the anatomy theater, he would isolate the organs of the senses and in the course of his demonstration, treat only them. Molding the annual public demonstration around his research, he used the public forum to explore the connections between anatomy and natural philosophy. (8)
Under Fabrici's guidance, the anatomy demonstration focused on the philosophical dimensions of anatomy rather than solely on the physical features and dissection of the corpse. Fabrici did not organize the demonstration around the gradual process of dissection, the opening of multiple cadavers and animals. Instead, he considered the initial question--How are structures shaped?--in order to explore the more important question: Why are structures shaped as they are? If the first question could be answered relatively quickly and descriptively, the second question took longer to answer, for it required a teleological understanding of nature and a sophisticated system of causal explanation that incorporated aspects of material composition, function, form, and purpose. It was this second question which occupied Aristotle, excited Fabrici, and became the subject matter of the public anatomy demonstration.
The anatomy theater became a place for Fabrici to develop and to publicize his innovative research on the philosophical causes (rather than physical structures) of anatomy. For his students as well, the demonstration was defined not by manual activity but rather by philosophical weight--that is, not by a physicality that might bleed into the Carnival season but rather by conceptual rigor. This distinction, however, led students to reconsider the anatomy demonstration as an integral part of their wider university education. They associated it with natural philosophy. As we shall see, once it took place in the specialized theater, students began to see the public demonstration as a civic event. They called attention to their presence in the theater in attempts to augment their reputation at the university and in the wider context of the Venetian Republic. Inside the anatomy theater, medical students became keenly aware of their behavior and of the newfound virtue of silence. (9)
Tracing the late sixteenth-century history of anatomy from the perspective of the students enables us to characterize the growing significance of the anatomy demonstration and the anatomy theater. While the anatomy theater helped to solidify the boundary between anatomy and surgery, it also became a place where knowledge was created and presented rather than disputed, where hearing the presentation was as important, if not more important, than seeing the dissected specimens. The theater allowed the study of anatomy, now more clearly weighted toward the philosophical, to intersect boldly with other features of the university and of the students' education. It displayed civic importance, and it reinforced the virtues of silence and docility that were then emerging in the late humanist environment of the university. In 1590, when the student remarked on the great civility of the anatomy demonstration, he implicitly recognized the civilizing role that the anatomy theater would come to play.
2. UNIVERSITY ANATOMY
Throughout the sixteenth century, the academic study of anatomy took place in both public and private venues. The public anatomy demonstration was offered once a year, private dissections more frequently during the academic year. Before 1595, when the anatomy theater was in use, public and private dissections included disputation: students tended to dispute points more frequently in private, professors in public. (10) But there were many kinds of exchange between the public and the private. In the early sixteenth century, public demonstrations of anatomy were given as introductions to inexperienced students. For example, Berengario da Carpi (ca. 1460-1530) called the public demonstration a common anatomy, signaling its introductory function; in contrast, he preferred the private demonstration because he liked to emphasize the importance of sight and touch and to develop a specialized understanding of human anatomy from human corpses, animal remains, and vivisected animals. (11) Although Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) argued in the 1540s that the public demonstration should include hands-on practice, participation, and disputation, it was the private dissection that eventually developed into a venue for these features and the pursuit of research and specialized knowledge. (12)
As one might expect, private dissections gave professors a chance to pursue anatomical particulars as well as anomalies. These were subjects for research. Private dissections also afforded students an education not only in particulars but also in the manual techniques of dissection. In university halls, hospital rooms, and pharmacies, students would learn to dissect human and animal corpses in various stages of decay, and studying musculature and bones, to identify and set fractures. (13) In similar venues, lessons on general surgery were offered and, though less frequent, they too reinforced the practical nature of anatomical knowledge. Students appreciated these lessons as much for their practical orientation as for the chance to participate in them by dissecting specimens and holding, touching, and asking questions about the dissected parts. (14) A letter from April 1590 praised the student Johannes Conradus Zinn for his handiwork and for his ability to "talk familiarly about surgical operations." (15) Another letter from June 1597 praised Johannes Richter for pursuing practical medicine, debating the arts of medicine, and "devoting himself to the laborious work of the administrations of anatomy and surgery." (16) Richter's handiwork, moreover, "caused the eyes of all to turn on him" and earned him the support of the transalpine nation "one by one and as a whole." (17) Especially for students, the key to anatomical knowledge was located in the manual and practical activities associated with private dissection and surgical training.
While the practical dimensions of anatomy remained popular with some students, a debate between the practical and natural-philosophical orientation of anatomical knowledge emerged. (18) This debate is best exemplified in the rivalry between Giulio Casseri (Iulius Casserius, 1561-1619) and Fabrici. As early as 1583 the academic roster distinguished lessons on anatomy from those on surgery and made Fabrici responsible for both; in practice, however, Casseri taught the extraordinary--that is, less eminent--lessons in surgery. (19) Holding a post at the hospital of San Francesco, Casseri came to the study of anatomy with practical concerns and practical expertise. (20) It was Fabrici, Casseri's former teacher and later rival, who taught the ordinary--that is, more eminent--lessons in anatomy. Well-established and highly regarded at the university, Fabrici took a special interest in the philosophical dimensions of anatomy, using the venue of the anatomy demonstration as a vehicle for his research. The ensuing rivalry between these two anatomists encouraged Fabrici to sharpen the differences between surgery and research-oriented anatomy and to maintain control over the annual, public anatomy demonstration.
Using the public forum of the demonstration to present his research, Fabrici redefined the uses of public and private anatomical exercises. Rather than conduct and discuss his research in private, by the 1590s Fabrici had begun to pursue his research in the more public anatomy demonstration. His research, as Andrew Cunningham has explained, depended on Aristotle's studies of nature and animals: that is, on Aristotelian methods and topics. (21) Fabrici extended the study of anatomy from the scrutiny of human, structural anatomy to a survey of structures present, present in altered form, or absent in a range of animals. (22) Finding these differences, he would explain them as essential or as environmentally conditioned. From essential differences between animals, he would formulate the incidence of a part, the way it occurred in a range of animals, with respect to the whole animal. For Fabrici, the whole animal was a composite formed from his many inquiries. His method isolated structures, identified their functions, and explored their uses and usefulness. In his work...
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