It must be dissection day here. I just stumbled across a review of a biography of an important figure in the history of surgery and dissection (not that I have heard of him before.) His name: Astley Cooper. From the New Statesman review:
In 1792, with a revolutionary glint in his eye, he made a pilgrimage to Paris, and was an appalled witness to the violence of the mob as they processed through the streets with bits of the bodies they had torn apart, like a grotesque parody of the enlightened surgical techniques he had gone there to learn....
Burch doesn't gloss over the unpleasant aspects of Cooper's personality: the vanity that sometimes confused the "theatre" of surgery with a love of self-display; the clumsy sense of humour that led him once to ask his hairdresser to reach into a tub of hair powder which he had replaced with monkey entrails; the willingness to use body-snatchers in his quest for new anatomical specimens; and especially the obsession with dissection that seemed to go well beyond the needs of medical science. If some of Cooper's experiments are hard to stomach, such as his decision to close the urethra of a rabbit merely to see what would happen (the rabbit died a slow and painful death), others are merely hard to fathom. One wonders what contribution to the knowledge of human anatomy was made by his public dissection of, among others, "elephants, cuttlefish, baboons, polar bears, walruses, lemurs, leopards, the lymphatics of a porpoise, kangeroos, tortoises, porcupines, panthers and seals and the stomach of a cormorant".
Quite the dissecting showman, wasn't he.
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