the healing occurred and that, to his knowledge, the recovery that had happened was impossible. The success of healing miracles requires the failure of medicine. In contrast, to judge a body holy a physician employed experience, knowledge of modern and classic medical writers and philosophers, and surgical skill to isolate and explain unusual anatomical features.40 Therefore, the postmortems on saints were a judgment by the Church of the positive contribution that medical professionals could make in defining the boundaries of the natural rather than, in the case of healing miracles, forcing such practitioners to admit the inadequacy of their skills.
The Church had good reason to view the medical profession, and especially anatomy, positively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practice of opening human bodies was of long standing by the sixteenth century and had begun in the late medieval period for a number of reasons: (1) to embalm the elite for as part of burial practices, (2) to determine the cause of death, (3) to investigate murders, and (4) to check physical signs of a saint’s holiness.41 From at least the twelfth century, an additional reason why medical practitioners engaged in anatomical investigations was to support the knowledge they gleaned from classical sources. The medical school in Salerno carried out animal dissection even at this early date. The first recorded use of a dissection to explain conclusions in a medical treatise appeared in a work by Mondino dei Liuzzi in 1316. Nevertheless, these dissections were to serve a didactic function, not an exploratory purpose.42 That is, they were meant to illustrate the principles observed in the canonical treatises of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, not challenge them. It was for this purpose that the Universities of Bologna and Padua established yearly, public anatomical dissections. The practice of public dissection was commonplace by the time they appear in the 1405 university statutes of Bologna and in the 1465 statutes of Padua.43
Therefore, when canonization officials turned to anatomy to help establish bodily miracles, they drew on a number of long-standing autopsy practices in Europe. The initial and ostensible reason that many saintly bodies were opened was to embalm the corpse for display. However, forensic motivations also inspired the dissectors, who sought anatomical explanation of either unusual ailments or behavior in prospective saints. Finally, since these medical men were testifying in a legal context, the established practice of using medical professionals as expert witnesses in criminal proceedings likely also inspired canonization officials. In short, that Peña and other canonization officials turned to anatomy to help demonstrate sanctity was in some ways a logical step, since the opening of human bodies had been commonplace in a number of related legal, funerary, and medical contexts. Indeed, Katharine Park has argued that it was a similar mix of motivations that led to the opening of female saintly bodies in the fourteenth century.44
Yet there were also new practices in medicine and anatomy that altered both who was involved with the postmortems on prospective saints and how the evidence found in the body was interpreted. In the medieval examinations of holy women, a physician generally was not present when the body was opened, whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church required specifically that physicians undertake the examination.45 This represents not just a change in personnel but also in what a physician’s duties and knowledge areas were supposed to be. The physicians were expected both to find unusual details in the human body and interpret them in part of an overall discussion of what could be natural for this specific body. That is, canonization officials expected physicians to draw on both empirical and theoretical medical knowledge to speak both about human bodies in general and a specific corpse in particular.
The reason for the Church’s new expectations for their physiciantestators was based on ongoing changes in how knowledge was made in medicine in the early modern period. Although still rooted in classical medical authorities such as Galen and Hippocrates, medicine by the early sixteenth century was undergoing what has been termed a “Renaissance” in its understanding of the human body.46 This was fueled by the increasing availability of old texts and a circulation of some newly discovered texts from the ancient world.47
During the sixteenth century, medicine increasingly emphasized firsthand experience of anatomy as a guide to understanding the human body. Traditionally considered a low form of knowledge making, one typically relegated to nonphysician practitioners, direct observation as a guide to practice was beginning to be recognized as more important for the medical profession. New works in fact circulated that sought to share such information widely—a clear indication of its value for the profession.48 By the early sixteenth century, then, a few physicians, including Alessandro Benedetti, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and Niccolò Massa, had conducted autopsies with their own hands as a way of uncovering new knowledge about the workings of human anatomy.49
Real change in attitudes toward dissection is evident in the 1543 publication of Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body. Despite his reliance on Galen in some respects, Vesalius also argued forcefully for the utility of firsthand knowledge of dissection.50 Indeed, Vesalius represented a fusion of knowledge-making techniques, since he employed the empirical methods characteristic of surgeons and apothecaries as well as using classical texts as sources with which to make knowledge about the human body.51 A number of anatomists, including Realdo Colombo and Charles Estienne, also engaged in this synthesis of empirical and learned practices and added their own arguments about the structure of the human body based on these methods.52 By the seventeenth century, Vesalian methods of dissection, according to historian Roy Porter, “had become the golden method for anatomical investigation.”53 This perhaps overstates the case, however, as students at even the best medical schools still might have had irregular access to actual dissections and many practitioners remained unconvinced by the new methods.54
Nevertheless, the power of Vesalian techniques is amply demonstrated by the number of landmark anatomical studies that were produced around the year 1600. Such publications documented for the first time the valves in human veins, the mechanisms of digestion, the structure of female reproductive anatomy, and, finally, the circulation of blood.55 Many physicians had now embraced an epistemology that fused empirical investigation with textual evidence as a way to understand the human body.
In sum, when the Church turned to physicians to conduct postmortems on holy individuals, it both drew on existing legal, funerary, and medical precedents relating to autopsies and embraced new trends about how medical professionals made knowledge about the human body. The following sections detail how this collaboration between medicine and religion developed over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
THE FIRST ATTEMPTS: IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA AND CARLO BORROMEO
The postmortems performed on Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556) and Carlo Borromeo (d. 1584) represent the first documented post-Reformation attempts to use anatomy to establish sanctity.56 In each case, the examination occurred shortly after the holy man’s death, and embalming was the initial reason for opening the corpse.57 The embalming of elites had been routine since the late Middle Ages and was not unusual in these cases.58 However, upon opening each corpse, the medical practitioners and other spectators involved discovered unusual anatomy. This anatomy then became the focal point of the postmortem. But the significance attached to the anatomy was not fixed: physicians, eager to promote their careers, saw in the bodies of saints the possibility of extending and illustrating their range of medical knowledge. In contrast, hagiographers who wrote about these postmortems sought to use anatomy as evidence of the divine. Each group engaged in the emerging genre of using direct observation to make knowledge so as to further a specific aim.59 But the fact that the same anatomical details could be interpreted very differently demonstrates that the meaning of bodily evidence was unstable and subjective. This instability meant that the negotiations about the significance of specific anatomical irregularities led to the exclusion of this evidence from the list of miracles for each of these two saints.
The autopsy of Ignatius of Loyola, occurring shortly after his death in 1556, demonstrates clearly the different meanings and uses of
