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LETTER |
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Sappol, National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bldg. 38, Rm. 1E-21, Bethesda, Md (e-mail: michael_sappol{at}nlm.nih.gov).
R. Cruz Begay’s comment reproduces some old, and mistaken, narratives about the history of anatomy while making a larger critique that raises important questions.
The authorities Begay cites on the history of anatomy are not authoritative.1 Dissection as part of medical education began in Italy in the 1200s, not the 1500s. The "laws against dissecting human corpses" are largely mythical. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dissection was sanctioned and sponsored by church and state; magistrates supplied schools with the bodies of executed criminals and the indigent poor. As medical schools proliferated in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, more dissections were performed, and with insufficient legal sources for bodies, body snatching also proliferated until laws were passed allowing medical schools to take the bodies of people who died in jails, poorhouses, and charity hospitals. This requisitioning of cadavers violated funerary customs and statutes against grave robbery. Beyond that, many people regarded dissection as a rape of the body and grave, a denial of humanity, an example of medical hubris, and perhaps blasphemy. But anatomy typically had the blessings of religious authorities. In some circles, dissection was even regarded as a pietistic activity: in studying the human body, we see God’s handiwork.
Begay’s broader point—that the appropriation, division, and analysis of the human body (anatomy) resulted in the development of an objectivizing set of practices now known as scientific medicine—is correct. Scientific medicine has accomplished amazing things (prevention of polio, treatment of tuberculosis, etc.). With a wide focus and deep empathy, scientific medicine can be a respectful and humanizing form of holism, albeit a materialist one. But it can also dissect us with cruel clinical detachment, turn us into statistical artifacts, specimens, research subjects. Its relentlessly narrow focus can be a form of ideological and spiritual amnesia or even murder ("We murder to dissect," wrote Wordsworth). Science too often turns a blind eye to social relations of power—the cultural, ideological, political, economic configurations that both cause and treat illness.
In this context, alternative medicine works as a symbolic response to a feeling that our medicine—and society—is ill, as a form of dissent or resistance.2 Begay’s comment, which mixes Native American and New Age terms like "soul wound" with Marxian concepts like "reification" and "alienation," rightly directs our attention to this neglected cultural dimension. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine takes alternative medical treatments, detaches them from the sociocultural networks and belief systems in which they are embedded, and conducts clinical trials to test their efficacy. It doesn’t acknowledge alternative medicine and healing as symbolic opposition. Instead, it turns alternative medical treatments into scientific medicine (or not). This is a good thing, but it does not address (and even subverts) the underlying logic that impels many people to seek out alternative medicine.
Notes
1. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone, 1992); Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Hants, UK and Brookfield, Vt: Scolar Press, 1997); C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); Katharine Park, "The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1–33; Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Penguin, 1988); and Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
2. This is understandable, but not always benign: the Taliban condemned the study of human anatomy, and the medicine based on it, as a sacrilege. They banned dissection and instruction in scientific medicine. And during their reign, many Afghanis went without treatment for easily treatable diseases.
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