The kinds of anatomy.

A FULL, or even adequate, discussion of the "kinds" of anatomy would be in effect a history of anatomy, and a partial history of medicine, biology and natural philosophy. The present discussion is more limited, and derives from work on certain aspects of medical education in seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Britain. What is meant by "the study of anatomy" should emerge later. At Oxford and Cambridge the medical faculties date from the early to midfourteenth century. From the "ancient statutes" of both universities it is clear that they adopted the same teaching texts as had been used in the medical faculty of Paris university. In this small group of texts there is none devoted specifically to anatomy. Not until the sixteenth century, when the crown began to take a positive interest in the universities-an interest dictated at first by political motives, but tempered with Renaissance scholarly attitudes-were the statutes affecting medical study revised. Thus in 1549, for the first time, was a requirement introduced for students of medicine to acquire some anatomical knowledge.' Credit for this innovation must probably justly be given to John Caius, whose friend Thomas Wendy, the royal physician, was among the Visitors who revised the statutes.2 Caius himself had of course made translations of Galen into Latin, and it may be significant that he chose for the most part Galen's physiological/anatomical books. Moreover, Caius delivered lectures on anatomy to the Barber-Surgeons in London for twenty years.3 When Caius came to refound Gonville Hall in 1557, he improved the endowment by, among other things, adding two medical fellowships, and he also provided funds for an annual dissection to take place and took care to secure also a royal patent for the supply of bodies from the assizes.4 For the medical fellows of Gonville and Caius College at least the requirements of the new university statutes had some rationale. On other occasions when the university statutes were revised or extended it is possible to detect some growing interest in anatomy/physiology: in 1559 the regius professor of medicine at Cambridge was enjoined to make an annual dissection if requested to do so by his students, who were to be prepared to defray the expenses;6 at Oxford in 1565 some new (Galenic) texts were introduced, including De usu partium.6 On the other hand, the requirement to have attended anatomies, as introduced in the 1549 statutes, seems to have been in effect abandoned at Oxford from *This article is based on a chapter ofmy unpublished London Ph.D. thesis, 1974, "Aspects of the history of medical education in Britain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries". I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Edwin Clarke for his help and critical interest in the preparation of this work, and the Wellcome Trust for financial support in the form of a Research Studentship. **Andrew Cunningham, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow, Weilcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BP.