Caitlin Kyaw

Professor Constance Clark

HI-2353

30 March 2017

Porter Short Paper: Dissection

Prior to the advent of dissection, doctors and medical practitioners knew little about

anatomy or physiology. Societies had some vague insight concerning the inner organs of the

body, which was assumed from the butchering and sacrificing of animals. But in order to gain

further knowledge, medicine would soon necessitate the dissection of humans, a practice

opposed by many religions and philosophies that deemed the body a temple or full of symbolic

meaning. But when human dissection stemmed from Hellenistic Alexandria, medical

practitioners were soon able to gather true and accurate information about the body by seeing

and experiencing its inner workings, unlike their predecessors who relied on and formulated

theories without observations to verify them.

Dissection was immensely important to the furthering of knowledge concerning human

anatomy and physiology. Prior to dissection, anatomy was not a main focus in medical

education, as practitioners could only glean information from animal dissections. But being able

to examine the workings of the human body lay the key to health and disease, as physicians

could then observe tangible organs and innards they had previously only been able to postulate

about. Where Galenic theory had derived assertions about the abdominal cavity from animal

dissections, practitioners Herophilus and his contemporary, Erasistratus, discovered and named

the prostate and duodenum in their public dissections of human cadavers. Cutting into the body

was revealing previously unknown organs and systems, and even though the number of these
discoveries was greatly outpacing accurate understanding of their functions, their mere unveiling

was greatly valuable. For example, the pharmacist Vesalius and his students published volumes

of illustrations of the skeleton and muscles and anatomical observations on the structures of

female genitalia that failed to grasp their actual physiological function, but new medical

knowledge of anatomy was able to give practitioners a solid foundation in their understanding of

the nature of disease and the human body.

Dissection as a teaching tool also provided a powerful empirical approach to medicine

and would drastically influence the way in which medicine would be practiced in the future.

Several volumes and guides about the knowledge gained from dissections that disproved old

Galenic theory and provided new information became common reads for medical students. These

publications bred a new climate of enquiry, challenging the theories that were commonplace

and the rising class of physicians to outshine one another to make new discoveries. And because

anatomy was becoming steadily more and more important, professors began to stress the viewing

of public human dissections, which often included a surgeon, who would cut a cadaver open, and

a teaching assistant, who would point out relevant features. As a result of these teachings and

public displays of dissection, medicine was making great leaps and bounds for our understanding

of the human body and paved the way for aspiring physicians of that time and now.
The inclusion of dissection as a tool to further our knowledge of human anatomy and

physiology made important and lasting impacts on medicine as we know it.