Hello Dr. Rugg,
The mail has been severely disrupted due to the ice storms in Kansas City and although I sent my abstract in the mail a while ago, I thought that it might be helpful to also send it to you electronically.
Thank you,
Lynda 
Dr. Lynda Payne


Abstract for The Social Context of Death,  Dying and Disposal Conference,  2002.

"‘The unactive carcasse thou hadst preyed upon': William Harvey and the Image of the Anatomist in early modern Britain."
	
In early modern Britain accumulating knowledge of normal and morbid anatomy through dissecting the human body not only led to a better understanding of nature but also defined the identity of the people who engaged in this activity.  This paper will analyse the relationship between systematically dismembering the dead and how this activity shaped the attitudes and emotions of early modern medical men towards the living. 

I will focus on the most famous anatomist in early modern Europe -- the discoverer of the circulation of the blood -- William Harvey (1578-1657).  As a medical student at the University of Padua,  Harvey was exposed to methods of dealing with death,  nakedness,  and the destruction of the human body,  in the sanitised milieu of the theatre of anatomy and the chaotic wards of local hospitals.  He found the dead body to be both a practical,  loathsome experience and yet a source of enormous theoretical fascination and satisfaction.  Harvey would go on to carry out hundreds of private dissections including those of his father and sister. 

The activities of Harvey and his followers did not escape the notice of the public. Stories began to circulate regarding the bizarre nature of those who dissected for a living,  and a particular stereotype emerged of a stoic,  but flamboyant and deeply troubling,  anatomist-physician. Critics of dissection-crazed medical men compared anatomy to the practice of cannibalism and suggested that those who frequently cut on the dead lost, or perhaps never even learned,  a humane bedside manner toward the living. 

William Harvey,   Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy: An Annotated Translation of Prelectiones Anatomiae Universalis,  C.D. O'Malley,  F.N.L. Poynter and K.F.Russell,  Berkeley: University of California Press,  1961.
 Johnathon Sawday,  The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture,  London: Routledge,  1995.


Lynda Payne
Assistant Professor of Medical History 
History Department
University of Missouri-Kansas City
5100 Rockhill Rd.
Kansas City,  MO 64110
816 235 2539
Fax. 816 235 5723
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