Av intresse om man spelar i medeltiden eller medeltids inspirerad värd. Beroende på vad man kör så kan de myter som tas upp vara minst lika matnyttiga som hur det egentligen såg ut.
It is often claimed that the Medieval Church banned human dissection, setting back progress in the study of anatomy. But no such ban existed.
historyforatheists.com
"
The claim that the Medieval Church “banned dissection” and so set back progress in the study of human anatomy is often made in popular sources. It is also regularly found in academic sources by medical experts commenting on the history of anatomy. So, unsurprisingly, it is often produced by anti-theists as evidence that Christianity retarded scientific knowledge for religious reasons. This is despite the fact there was no such “ban” and that the practice of anatomical dissection that founded the modern study of anatomy actually began in medieval schools of medicine.
The Claims
As discussed here many times, anti-theistic conceptions of history lean heavily on the nineteenth century
Conflict Thesis – the idea that science and religion have been at war down the ages, with religion constantly restricting and retarding the progress of science and science struggling against superstition and unreason to advance human knowledge. Historians of science have long since rejected this thesis, but it pervades most popular conceptions of history and elements of it continue to be accepted as unalloyed and unquestioned fact.
As a result, the claim that the Church “banned human dissection” and thus stalled our understanding of human anatomy for centuries is regularly repeated. So people on TikTok are assured this was the case by a history teacher on his channel “History with Mr Atkinson”:
“Mr Atkinson” has 183,000 followers. His little video, consisting of the claim in the shot above and him shaking his head with music in the background, encapsulates the main claim made about the Church and dissection. According to this story, the ancients did some human dissection, but it was banned with the coming of Christianity. The Catholic Church favoured the anatomy of
Galen (129-c.216) because his ideas about humans having souls were compatible with Christianity. So they forbade any dissection because Galen was considered the last word in anatomy and so was not to be questioned and because their religious beliefs about the coming resurrection of the dead meant bodies had to be left intact. But they were defied by the Renaissance anatomist
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who undertook dissections and showed where Galen was wrong, with his work marking the beginning of modern scientific anatomy.
This neat story fits many modern prejudices and preconceptions and so it gets repeated as fact without question. Thus an
online summary of medicine in the Renaissance blithely presents it uncritically, declaring “the Church had banned dissection, believing that it subtracted from the dignity of the deceased, who should be buried whole”. Oddly, they illustrate this “ban” by reference to Galen, saying “for example, Galen ….never dissected a human, only animals so, while his work was valuable, it was also incorrect and did not take into account the nuances of human anatomy”, despite the fact Galen was a pagan and died a full century before Christianity was in a position to ban anything at all. The same article is also happy to indulge in some lurid fantasy, claiming that later “the church allowed the dissection of criminals and blasphemers although, gruesomely, these criminals were sometimes still alive when dissections occurred and the audience watched and learned.” This is nonsense, but in keeping with the general weird tenor of the article.
Unfortunately it is not just popular pieces that repeat this claim. "
För resten av texten följ länken.