Midwifery and medicine in early modern France: Louise Bourgeois

Flanders and served that most Catholic of rulers, Charles V, is not mentioned, although Colombo is given counter-reformation Catholic beliefs because he served the Pope, and Fabricius' religious views are deduced from his friendship with Sarpi and his membership of the Venetian intellectual elite. To his credit, Cunningham is honest in his admission of the theory's weaknesses. He allows that Colombo probably wrote his anatomy book before he came to Rome, and that Vesalius' Lutheranism is a mere inference, but that does not prevent him from indulging in argumentation that is circular or inconsistent. The types of anatomy identified in Part One are "not comparable" (and hence historians are to be barred from comparing them), but in Part Two the very loosest of-comparisons are employed to establish a case. Thus, for example, Silvius and Guenther followed Erasmian methods of exposition in their teaching: they may well be Erasmian in religion (certainly untrue for the later Guenther). The politician Contarini's use of Aristotle's Politics to praise the Venetian constitution, and Venice's reluctance to obey all the dictates of Papal Rome are taken to indicate that Venetian views on religion ("a patriotic duty") encouraged Fabricius to follow Aristotle. Hypotheses turn into facts, the absence of direct evidence becomes a suggestion, and then reality. The unexceptionable conclusion that religion and science were not then discrete and unrelated fields is turned to mean that anatomy was a religious activity or did not lead to a secularizing worldview (which is far from proved as a universal truth). The rigour applied to the arguments of others is conspicuously missing when Cunningham comes to evaluate his own. This is sad, not only because the many good things in Part One will be neglected (or, what may be worse, they will compel assent from the neophyte to the speculations of Part Two), but because an opportunity has been wasted to test a provocative hypothesis. There are writers on anatomy (Caius, Gesner, Platter, to name but a few) whose religious beliefs are knowable and whose anatomical books are easily accessible, and the theory of a religious motivation for the study of anatomy, and of types of anatomy differing according to religion, might well be tested against them. One might then establish how far "Wittenberg anatomy" spread beyond North Germany, and whether this represented a specifically Lutheran (as opposed to a Protestant) standpoint. But such nuances are not for Cunningham, whose commitment to his religious thesis is credal. An opportunity has also been lost to break fully from the idea that dissection was so obviously a good thing that its non-appearance is to be condemned. As Cunningham rightly insists, anatomy is a peculiar practice, and historians must pay far more attention to why it was ever introduced and sustained. But for that a different book is wanted, one that would leave Italy for Vienna, Oxford, or Salamanca, and would combine the intellectual insights of Part One of this book with the practical details analysed recently by Andrea Carlino and Jurgen Helm. Religion would then be seen as a component in the aims and methods of some anatomists, but not the universal and overriding motive that it is made out to be in this book.