Roger French examines the practice of cutting condemned criminals into their smallest parts and experimenting on already vivisected animals during the European Renaissance. The period illustrations included are given special attention.

Why did medical men of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance make it a central point of medical education to cut the bodies of condemned criminals into their smallest parts, and perform experiments on vivisected animals? Neither had any direct medical relevance, and the purpose of this book is to discover what lay at the basis of these practices, what purpose they served and what cultural circumstances made them possible and desirable. The book offers a series of answers based on the religious, intellectual and social circumstances that were particularly European. Beliefs about the body and soul, the compartmentalized nature of late mediaeval forces that governed the trade of medicine and the specialty of anatomy are all examined. The illustrations generated by these circumstances and by the arts of the woodcut and of printing are given special attention.

The European body
the uses of anatomical knowledge
Bologna and Padua - anatomical rationalities
animals, Christian man and nature - emulating the ancients
denying the ancients
vivisection
the image of God
dissection and discovery - the newest Aristotle
epilogue - experimental philosophy.