Circulation

IN THE COLD antechamber on the first floor of the Bo, Harvey waited to be called into the circular anatomical theatre. The very first permanent theatre of its kind in Europe, it had been built in 1594, ‘for the majesty of Venice’, in order to ‘display the glory of her nature no less than did the circus games and gymnasiums of antiquity’.¹ Anatomies were made free of charge, according to university statutes, ‘in order that everyone may come’ to enjoy what were civic as well as scholarly spectacles.

As Harvey waited, the porters called into the theatre men and women from the general public – typically a miscellaneous sample of ‘teachers, tailors, shoemakers, sandal-makers, butchers, salted fish dealers, porters, basket-bearers … jacks-in-office, money-lenders and barbers’, dressed in the colourful uniforms of their trade. The porter ushered them up the theatre’s external spiral staircase, which led to a series of landings, and so out onto the upper gallery. This was the fifth of the circular galleries, in this theatre shaped like a wooden ‘o’.

The public filed out into the gallery until no one else could be squeezed in. They peered down at the dissection table, which dominated an oval floor space of only twenty by twenty feet. The table was encircled by a halo of light emanating from two candelabra which stood at either end and eight torches held by standing students.

The anatomy theatre at Padua University (1654).

Each member of the 250-strong audience was wedged into a twenty-inch space in which they could stand with a tolerable degree of discomfort. Each of the five galleries was raised a full three feet above the one beneath it, the steep sides of the theatre giving it the appearance of a funnel. The press of so many people packed tightly into such a small, illuminated, windowless space, and the height of the middle and upper galleries, induced in some spectators nausea and vertigo. Carved wooden railings prevented queasy members of the audience falling forwards, down on to the dissection table. It was impossible, however, for anyone suddenly taken ill to leave the theatre without the entire row filing out before them. For the duration of the three-hour dissection, the spectator was hemmed in.

The porters called in the gowned medical students next, nation by nation, the Germans being particularly well represented. They climbed the external stairs and took their places in the fourth, third and second galleries, below the public. When they had finally settled, it was Harvey’s turn to enter, along with the other councillors, who had the privilege of occupying the first gallery.

Anatomical demonstrations required a cold venue so that the cadaver did not putrefy too quickly. They were usually held in January or February, at Carnival time (ironically the word ‘carnival’ comes from the Latin carnelevamen, which means to ‘put away flesh’). Sessions began in the bitter chill of the Paduan winter morning, not long after the ringing of the eight o’clock bells; this particular anatomy would have taken place in February 1601 or 1602.

After a few minutes the porters called for silence and announced the entrance of the rectors of the city and of the university, attired in their robes of purple and gold. They were followed by local aristocrats, government officials and university professors, all of whom were likewise dressed in magnificent robes. They took their seats immediately around the dissection table and in the luoghi a basso – small boxes directly beneath the first gallery. If any waggish student had trespassed into these areas before the arrival of the dignitaries, he was ejected and fined. It was vital that, at this important civic occasion, people sat ‘according to the degrees of their precedence’.

It was the duty of the porters to ensure that the proper calm and modesty reigned throughout the auditorium; they hovered on the landings, ever ready to quell trouble. They were specifically instructed, in the statutes, to ‘restrain the importunate plebs’, who were forbidden to chat or laugh while the anatomist spoke. On no account should there be any sudden movement or speaking out. In particular, ‘during the demonstrations of the female genitalia, they should contemplate everything with chaste eyes’. Yet despite their best efforts, heckling often occurred; on occasion spectators sometimes even fell to blows.

Engraving of the anatomy theatre at Padua on the title page of an anatomical volume (1647). The public in the upper galleries resembles the audience of a play. Men and women loll around, and appear to talk to one another.

A far greater threat of disturbance came, however, from the students. During anatomies they sometimes fought duels with swords. There were also loud slanging matches between the various nations, with the ‘mad Italians’ (as they were known) regularly taunting the others. Objects, as well as insults, were hurled across the auditorium; on one occasion a melon struck a professor full in the face. The anatomist often became ‘confused, upset and bewildered owing to some noise and disorder that the students made’; he would then hurry quickly to the end of a dissection, or walk out before the conclusion. Offending students were fined heavily for causing trouble, and stripped of their voting privileges.

The theatre had been designed with the express aim of limiting disturbances, its magnificent structure and atmosphere enveloping the civic and religious ritual of anatomy in an air of solemnity. Its walls were adorned with the imposing emblems of the Venetian Republic as well as the various insignia of the illustrious anatomists who performed there. The limited space inside the galleries made it difficult for spectators to turn to their neighbours; the darkness precluded the identification of other audience members.

The auditorium was also filled with the sweet airs of music, played on lutes to quell the ‘tumult and stomping’ of the spectators and ‘to raise them from their sad look’. The melodies were similar to those played on other civic occasions requiring an atmosphere of tranquillity.

The lute players were among the last to enter the theatre, taking their seats around the dissection table. Now that all the spectators were present, the head porter, carrying a golden mace, entered the auditorium and demanded silence. He announced the arrival of the protagonist of the performance, using his Latinized name ‘Hieronymous Fabricius ab Aquapendente’. Fabricius (born Girolamo Fabrizi) was professor of anatomy and surgery at Padua. Dressed in dazzling purple and gold robes, he entered with a theatrical flourish to the accompaniment of music, followed by two assistants. Still brimming with energy in his late sixties, the anatomist marched over towards the throne of carved wood next to the dissection table, then slowly lowered himself into it. His two assistants took their places on stools beside him.

Fabricius’ robes were identical to those of the rector, a unique privilege among the University faculty past and present, granted him by Venice. The small, bald-headed, bearded anatomist wore these garments with the ease of one who had been born a noble, then risen to the very top of his profession. Fabricius was renowned throughout Europe as the latest in a line of great Paduan anatomists which included Andreas Vesalius and Gabriele Fallopius, discoverer of the Fallopian tubes. Along with the robes, the ‘most serene’ republic awarded Fabricius a substantial salary, as well as a golden chain. Venice also constructed the new permanent anatomical theatre at his behest, and perhaps also to his specifications.²

Seventeenth-century portrait of Fabricius.

Members of the German Nation, however, were less than impressed with their professor, complaining that the caro vecchione (‘dear old man’) had become arrogant, vain and indolent in his dotage, ‘like a lazy horse who had to be spurred on’. Fabricius responded to their proddings by finding every possible excuse to delay or even cancel his public dissections, at the shortest possible notice. When, at a meeting of the university authorities, the Germans protested about his behaviour, the anatomist claimed not to understand them on account of their appalling Latin pronunciation. ‘It’s a great shame’, he sneered, ‘that you Germans compress your lips so much while speaking, so that the fs come out as vs; one hardly understands you.’ Fabricius then proceeded to impersonate them, much to the amusement of everyone present.

According to the university statutes, the anatomical performance should be conducted along traditional lines, with the seated professor reading from Mondino, the sector doing the cutting, and the ostensor indicating to the audience the organs the professor described. Yet Fabricius insisted that very little cutting be carried out in the theatre, always instructing his assistants to dissect the body before the performance. They worked upon the corpse in a little white stone chamber, situated directly beneath the auditorium, where all the skeletons, instruments, sponges and clothes were stored.

The illustrious anatomist now called for the cadaver. To the accompaniment of lutes, the body was handed up to his assistants from the dissection pit through a trapdoor. The assistants positioned it carefully on the brown seven-foot dissection table, where it lay at the very centre of the circular theatre.

Fabricius now addressed the audience. ‘The exposition of anatomy is sacred and divine, it must be approached in the same spirit and mind as divine service, since it bears witness to the power, goodness and wisdom of God. For God wishes and has the power to ensure that all parts of the human body and those of every animal are in the best possible situation, and that all parts of man are in the very best state. Such marvels of nature should not lie hidden from us, so we shall now reveal them.’

The aim of natural philosophy was to understand God, and to uncover his laws, through an investigation of His created world. Fabricius was concerned to show that anatomy could play a crucial part in this noblest of all endeavours. Perhaps partly provoked by Cremonini’s dismissal of the subject as an empirical enterprise of little deductive value, he aimed to raise anatomy’s philosophical prestige, and his own profile in the process, by demonstrating how it could be conducted along Aristotelian lines and to Aristotelian ends. The magnificent theatre that had been built for him embodied these ambitions.

‘I shall follow and expound Aristotle,’ Fabricius announced, ‘that great interpreter of nature.’ A representative man of the Renaissance, the Italian wanted to revive an intellectual project of the classical world in its original, uncorrupted form. Drawing on the plethora of freshly edited Aristotelian texts spawned by the printing press, he would dissect as if he were Aristotle – that is, as though Galen had not yet been born.

Aristotle had viewed the body as the ‘soul-in-action’, which was to say that the soul used a particular organ as its instrument for a specific end. The Aristotelian anatomist must identify the various ‘causes’ of an organ if he was to define what ‘kind-of-a-thing’ it was. The first step was to provide a description or historia of an organ. Next, its action (or ‘efficient cause’) was to be understood (this included an investigation of the particular role it performed within the body’s economy). Then the structure (or ‘material cause’) of the organ was to be considered, for this enabled the organ to perform its action. Lastly, the ‘final cause’ or purpose of the organ was to be identified. Following Aristotle, and in contrast to Galen, Fabricius examined an organ (or groups of organs) in isolation from each other, dedicating a single anatomy session to, say, the organs of sight, sound, speech, reproduction or respiration.

On this occasion we may imagine Fabricius investigating the eye, his assistant removing one from the cadaver’s head. As it was held up to the audience, the anatomist offered a detailed description, drawing on anatomical authorities and his own observations, before explaining its function within the body. Turning to its structure and substance – its crystalline humour, for example – he showed how it was designed in order to fulfil its function. Finally he declared that the purpose of the organ, its raison d’être, was seeing. This final cause allowed one to fully grasp its form and action, for it had been designed by God with that express purpose in mind.

At this point, Fabricius called for the body of an animal to be passed up from the dissection pit. His Aristotelian aim was to investigate the function and purpose of an organ in all animals, or rather to define the universal organ in the animal that was man, plus every other animal – man being an animal in physical or material terms. Fabricius, following his Greek master, held that only in this way could the anatomist arrive at generalized philosophical knowledge of an organ – the detailed investigations of a variety of different animals leading to universalized knowledge. It was through this subtle interplay between particulars and general statements (as well as through his use of the four causes) that Fabricius aimed to give the lie to Cremonini’s criticisms of anatomy.

Fabricius’ assistants hauled up, out of the trap door, the carcass of a sheep, then removed one of its eyes. Fabricius described it, comparing it to the human organ already examined. He then asked his assistants to bring up further animal carcasses – of a bird, oxen or bull – from the dissection pit. Examining the eye of each in turn, Fabricius described their differences and similarities, in order to build up a generalized picture of how all animals see. Having finished with a particular animal specimen, its remains were thrown into a large bucket that lay beside the dissection table.

The highpoints of Fabricius’ anatomical spectacles from the public’s point of view, were the presentation of the naked, partially opened corpse at the beginning, and the ripping up of the menagerie. The sight of the dead animals probably struck them as absurd and amusing, as though a civic theatre had been transformed into a butcher’s shop. Intermittent ripples of excitement went through the upper galleries at these strange sights; people gasped, and chatted away. The professors and dignitaries at the front of the theatre may also have regarded the exploration of animal carcasses as incongruous, as it was not common practice in conventional university anatomy.

Yet as the three-hour demonstration progressed, the public became increasingly insensitive to shock, as well as to the lulling effects of the music. The sound of their murmuring gradually rose; they fidgeted in their confined places. To muffle their noise, the musicians would be asked to increase the volume. In some universities a fool was also employed to raise the audience’s flagging spirits. A wooden panel in one of the galleries suddenly opened, revealing the fool’s funny face. He cracked an outrageous joke, perhaps about the corpse, then quickly popped his head back inside the panel, shutting the door with a slam.

In the middle galleries many of the students also become restive, but from irritation rather than boredom. For one thing, they could hardly see the body parts Fabricius was discussing, only the vaguest outline being visible from the third and fourth galleries. More importantly, virtually all of them had enrolled at Padua with an eye to a career as a surgeon or physician. What they had hoped for was a crash course in practical dissection and surgical techniques, and a thorough description of the human body, within the context of physiology and medicine. Vesalius, who worked within the human-centred, Galenic anatomical tradition, had secured Padua’s fame sixty years previously with this variety of instruction.

‘I lament the fate of myself and my fellow students’, the councillor of the German Nation moaned to the university authorities, ‘and marvel at the good luck of my predecessors. They often saw two or three bodies dissected [completely] each year, while we who have come here at no less expense cannot even see one. Fabricius has already spent two months describing the bones of the head. Now that he has reached the muscles, he has devoted three hours to three of them, and there are so many muscles that two years will not be sufficient. When will he talk about the viscera?’ The ‘dear old man’, with his irrelevant philosophical ideas and his esoteric comparisons between human and animal organs, was simply too slow. He also progressed, or rather digressed, in ‘a confused and disorderly way [discussing] a detached arm one day, many days later the foot. I don’t see how anyone can learn the relations of the parts to the whole’.

Predictably, the complaints only roused Fabricius’ sarcasm. ‘This Fabricius’, the imperious anatomist whined, mimicking the Germans’ inelegant Latin, ‘can teach nothing usefully, nothing productively’, emphasizing the vulgarity of the words ‘useful’ and ‘productive’ to a natural philosopher intent on understanding God’s creation. The Germans, he declared, were utterly unworthy of his masterful performances. Henceforth he delayed or cancelled the sessions evermore frequently and flagrantly, so that the German students were forced to hire rival anatomists to conduct private anatomies, in the Galenic–Vesalian style, in makeshift outdoor theatres around the city.

Yet what the Germans deemed arcane and irrelevant was music to the ears of the alert, diminutive Englishman who would sit in the first gallery of the theatre, in the penumbra of the ring of candlelight surrounding the dissection table, watching every movement of the master’s hand, committing to memory his methods and ideas. Harvey must have sensed that he was in the presence of a man who, through his Aristotelian principles and comparative approach, had ‘placed his head among the stars’ of the intellectual firmament.

The cadaver used at public anatomies would, preferably, be whole, and of a young and healthy person, with a well-defined and well-maintained musculature. Ideally, it would be the corpse of a criminal hanged in Padua; if none was available then anyone executed in the Venetian Republic or in Italy would suffice. The criminals could not themselves hail from the Veneto, for the dissection of their corpses might give offence to their relatives and potentially lead to a vociferous protest in the theatre; nor could the cadaver be of noble birth. In some Italian cities, it was preferred to perform dissections on the bodies of ‘Jews or other infidels’.

Dissection constituted part of the punishment for ‘delinquents’ who had exiled themselves from human society and sympathy by their felonies. Closely resembling the quartering of a body after hanging, anatomy added a new terror to death, especially for those who believed in the resurrection of the body in some form, as all Catholics did. At the beginning of his anatomy Fabricius would solemnly announce ‘our subject for the anatomy lesson has been hanged’, indicating that the dissection was an epilogue to the execution.

Prior to the hanging of a felon earmarked for dissection, a messenger from the university would visit the monks who attended him during his final hours. The messenger carried with him a mandate from the rector and the city governor, demanding that the body be given up to the university immediately following the execution. The order was kept secret from the criminal, so as not to provoke hysteria or any blasphemous utterances on the gallows. After the execution the body might be carried to the university on a bier in procession by the monks, or collected directly from the scaffold by a group of students. Sometimes students tied the corpse to a horse’s tail and dragged it all the way to the Bo.

The close cooperation between the religious orders, the state and the university demanded by these operations, sometimes bordered on collusion. During one dissection of the period, the anatomist announced ‘tomorrow we shall have another body – I believe they will [today] hang a man upon which I shall demonstrate to you’ – which suggests that executions were possibly timed with anatomies in mind. Anatomical needs probably influenced the type of execution decreed by a judge (a hanged criminal was the most suitable for an anatomy) and may even have affected the sentence itself. In Bologna it was rumoured that one ‘poor wretch had been condemned to prison for life, but to satisfy the demands of the scholars, the cardinal legate overruled the sentence and had him condemned to death’.

When cadavers were unavailable through official channels, students would steal them from hospitals and graveyards, bringing them stealthily to the Bo by night, often with the approval, and participation, of their professors. Sometimes cadavers were even filched during funerals, the students whisking them off biers, or out of open graves, and sprinting away to the university with their prize. On one occasion, hearing word of the murder of a peasant, students ‘hurried to the scene to obtain the cadaver for an anatomy; but the peasants having gathered there in good number did not let them take the body away, and the scholars were obliged to be patient’.

After a demonstration had finished, the cadaver (if no longer of use for a future dissection) was consigned to a religious institution. If monks had originally delivered the body to the university, they would now come to collect it. With the help of the students, they conveyed it to their monastery, where it would receive a Christian burial. As the executed person had been subjected to the appalling ignominy of dissection, more than twenty Masses would be celebrated for their soul. That, at least, was how the cadaver was supposed to be disposed of according to the law. In Padua, however, the students were notorious for hurling the remains of dissected cadavers into the river, or feeding them to the dogs, along with the carcasses of the animals Fabricius had cut up.

On 25 April 1602 Harvey presented himself for the final oral examination of his medical degree in the presence of a Palatine count. Venice had bestowed on the count the power of conferring degrees, even on non-Catholics such as Harvey, much to the annoyance of the Vatican.

‘Count Sigismund’, according to Harvey’s diploma, ‘listened with pleasure to the noble and erudite William Harvey of Folkestone, an Englishman, son of the illustrious Thomas Harvey, Councillor of the English Nation, learnedly, eloquently, and in a praiseworthy and excellent style, discussing the themes in Arts and Medicine propounded him by … Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Public Professor of Anatomy and Surgery [and various other professors] … moreover subtly replying to, and lucidly resolving the argument, doubts, and cases brought before him.’

The examination took the form of a disputation, the eager Englishman defending his theories in front of Fabricius and company, with agile arguments demonstrating both his grasp of philosophical logic and his mastery of rhetorical style. After the interrogation one of the professors ‘did solemnly decorate and adorn the noble William Harvey with the accustomed Insignia and ornaments belonging to a Doctor’. A golden ring was placed on his finger, and the cap of a doctor on his head as a ‘sign of the Crown of Virtue’. Then Harvey was presented with ‘certain books of philosophy and medicine’, the professor opening and closing them in front of his eyes before ‘bestowing on him the Kiss of Peace with the Magistral Benediction’. This intriguing ceremonial gesture probably symbolized Harvey’s mastery of natural philosophy and medicine, disciplines that were now ‘open books’ to him.

By this ceremony the Paduan authorities placed their official seal on Harvey’s ‘authority and liberty … in every country and place to lecture, repeat, advise, heal, debate, interpret, to decide questions, to govern schools [and] make bachelors’. He had won the right to teach and practise as a physician, and to embark on a potentially lucrative career.

Thomas Harvey also basked in his eldest son’s brilliance, being described in the diploma, as ‘illustrious’ rather than as a simple ‘yeoman’. Whatever moral degradations the stern patriarch may have feared for William on his departure to Italy, he must have been well pleased to greet the young man who returned, diploma and books in hand, to ‘Kent and Christendom’ in 1602.

1 The building has indeed proved to be ‘permanent’, being the only theatre of the Renaissance to have survived intact to this day. The magnificent structure can still be visited at the University of Padua.

2 Famous for his genius in anatomy, Fabricius was also notorious for his choleric disposition. One day a former student of his, newly promoted within the faculty to the same professorial rank as Fabricius, refused to give way to his old mentor on the city’s pavements. Fabricius responded by hiring armed bodyguards to escort him everywhere. Should he be insulted by the upstart a second time, he would demonstrate that ‘he could handle a knife in other ways than in dissecting cadavers’.