Medieval Biology. The Renaissance

In Italy, the practice of dissection was revived in the later Middle Ages. The practice was still in disrepute but there was an important law school at Bologna and it frequently happened that legal questions concerning cause of death might best be decided by a post-mortem study. Once that grew to seem justified it was an easy step to the use of dissection in medical teaching. (Both Bologna and Salerno were noted for their medical schools at the time.)

The revival of dissection did not at once break new ground in biology. At first the primary purpose was to illustrate the works of Galen and Avicenna. The teacher himself was a learned scholar who had studied the books but who felt that the actual dissection was a demeaning job to be left in the hands of an underling. The teacher lectured but did not look to see whether the statements he delivered agreed with the facts, while the underling (no scholar himself) was anxious only to keep from offending the lecturer. The grossest errors were therefore perpetuated, and features that Galen had found in animals and supposed, therefore, to be present in humans were "found" in humans, too, over and over again, though they did not, in fact, exist in humans.

One exception to this sad situation was the Italian anatomist, Mondino de' Luzzi (1275-1326). At the Bologna medical school, he did his own dissections and, in 1316, wrote the first book to be devoted entirely to anatomy. He is therefore known as the "Restorer of Anatomy." But it was a false dawn. Mondino did not have the courage to break completely with the errors of the past and some of his descriptions must have been based on the evidence of the old books rather than that of his own eyes. Moreover, after his time, the practice of dissection by means of an underling was re-established.

Outside the formal domain of science, however, a new motivation toward the study of biology was arising in Italy. The period of the rebirth of learning (partly through the rediscovery of the ancient writings and partly through a natural ferment within European culture itself) is referred to as the "Renaissance."

During the Renaissance, a new naturalism in art grew apace. Artists learned how to apply the laws of perspective to make paintings take on a three-dimensional appearance. Once that was done, every effort was made to improve art's mimicry of nature. To make the human figure seem real, one had to study (if one were completely conscientious) not only the contours of the skin itself but also the contours of the muscles beneath the skin; the sinews and tendons; and even the arrangement of the bones. Artists, therefore, could not help but become amateur anatomists.

Perhaps the most famous of the artist-anatomists is the Italian, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who dissected both men and animals. He had the advantage over ordinary anatomists of being able to illustrate his own findings with drawings of the first quality. He studied (and illustrated) the manner in which the bones and joints were arranged. In doing so, he was the first to indicate accurately how similar the bone arrangements were in the leg of the human and the horse, despite surface differences. This was an example of "homology," which was to unite into firmly knit groups many animals of outwardly diverse appearance and was to help lay further ground-work for theories of evolution.

Leonardo studied and illustrated the mode of working of the eye and the heart; and he pictured plant life as well. Because he was interested in the possibility of devising a machine that would make human flight possible, he studied birds with great attention, drawing pictures of them in flight. All of this, however, he kept in coded note-books. His contemporaries were unaware of his work, which was discovered only in modern times. He did not, therefore, influence the progress of science, and for his selfish hoarding of knowledge, Leonardo is to be blamed.

As anatomy slowly revived, so did natural history. The fifteenth century had seen an "Age of Exploration" dawn upon Europe, and European ships ranged the coasts of Africa, reached India and the islands beyond, and discovered the Americas. As once before, after the conquests of the Macedonians and the Romans, new and unheard of species of plants and animals roused the curiosity of scholars.

An Italian botanist, Prospero Alpini (1553-1617), served as physician to the Venetian consul in Cairo, Egypt. There he had the opportunity to study the date palm and note that it existed as male and female. Theophrastus had noticed this almost two thousand years before but the fact had been forgotten and the asexuality of plants had been accepted. Alpini was the first European, furthermore, to describe the coffee plant. The natural history' of the Renaissance reached its most voluble development with the Swiss naturalist, Konrad von Gesner (1516-65). He was much like Pliny in his wide-ranging interests, his universal curiosity, his tendency to gullibility, and his belief that the mere mass accumulation of excerpts from old books was the way to universal knowledge. In fact, he is sometimes called the "German Pliny.”