Note 125 — A STUDY IN EARLY RENAISSANCE ANATOMY,

How rarely dissections were conducted in some of the Universities may be gathered from the first statutes of the medical faculty of Tübingen, dated 1497. These ordain a dissection every three or four years. Not till 1601 was an anatomy held at Tübingen even once a year (see Säxinger, loc. cit.). Even at Montpellier in the sixteenth century the scarcity was so great that Rondelet (1507–66) was on one occasion reduced to dissect the body of his son. For this terrible incident see A. Portal, Histoire de l’Anatomie et Chirurgie, Paris, 1770, vol. i, p. 522; A. Haller, Bibliotheca anatomica, Lib. iv, § clxxxiv, Leyden, 1774, vol. i, p. 205; and A. O. Goelicke, Introductio in historiam litterariam anatomes, Frankfurt, 1738, p. 136. There was, however, a relatively plentiful supply of subjects in the Italian Universities and especially at Bologna and Padua in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries (cp. A. Haller, Bibliotheca anatomica, introduction to Lib. v, p. 218). This was perhaps due to the utterly depraved state of public and private morals to which the peoples of the peninsula had been reduced by the excesses of the tyrants and the condottieri.