Note 127 — A STUDY IN EARLY RENAISSANCE ANATOMY,

Plate XXIX: a post-mortem scene in the late fourteenth century, from a French MS. of the Grande Chirurgie of Guy de Chauliac, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier, MS. 184 français, folio 14 recto. The scene is laid in the bedroom of the deceased. In the left-hand top corner is the bed, by the side of which a female figure, partly obliterated, is praying. Below and to the left are two other female figures, and a man richly dressed in an ermine-trimmed robe. These are presumably the relatives of the dead. The corpse, that of a woman, has been placed on a bare table and is opened from the larynx to the symphysis pubis. In front stands a lad holding a round wooden vessel for the reception of the viscera, and farther to the right is a stool on which are placed two or three instruments. The physician, in full canonicals, is at the extreme right of the picture. The actual process of examination is being made by three of his assistants. To the left the first of these deepens, with a knife, the incision that has already been made over the sternum, the second is grasping with his two hands and rolling up the great omentum so as to display the viscera beneath, and the third holds a wand in his right hand, with which he points to the abdomen, while in his left he carries a book. Five others throng into the room from a passage which opens into it.