the professor of anatomy at the University of Rome La Sapienza.60 The declared reason for opening Loyola’s body was an embalming effort requested by the Jesuits.61 There may also have been forensic motivation, as Loyola’s final ailment had not been considered life-threatening by his physicians.62 Still, the autopsy was not initially expected to confirm any signs of sanctity. It was only because Colombo found such unusual anatomy inside the deceased Jesuit that he thought it worthy of documentation.
Colombo recounted the details of Loyola’s postmortem in his anatomical manual De re anatomica, published in 1559 as part of a narrative that emphasized his own expertise. In fact, the entire text of Colombo’s De re anatomica was intended to promote its author’s reputation and, to some extent, attack Vesalius, whom Colombo viewed as a rival.63 Throughout the text, Colombo based his authority in part on the immense experience that he had with dissection and autopsy.64 The section in which Loyola’s autopsy appears, in particular, seems to have been designed to demonstrate Colombo’s superior skill and knowledge as an anatomist. This section purports to treat “those things which are rarely found in anatomy.”65 Colombo emphasizes, though, that such rarities were in some ways not new to him: “I, however, from the beginning of my career have dissected innumerous bodies, and in the last fifteen years I have dissected an even greater number in the center of the well-attended academies of Pavia, Pisa, and Rome.”66 In addition, Colombo notes that he sometimes “dissected fourteen bodies in a year” and that “no type of body has been denied to me for dissection, except for a man who was mute from birth.”67 Thus, this section served to underline Colombo’s skill and demonstrate that he had more knowledge of human anatomy than his contemporaries or than even the classical authorities on anatomy.
Colombo suggests in this section that he undertook a great many private autopsies, which added to his knowledge of human anatomy. As two editors of his work note, it would be difficult for a modern pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies a year to see all the abnormalities that Colombo had observed, let alone a sixteenth-century practitioner who should have at most been opening a few dozen.68 Cynthia Klestinec has argued that private, explorative autopsies were much more common and were considered surer ways of gaining knowledge of the human body than had previously been thought for early modern Europe.69 By highlighting the extreme diversity that he had seen in human bodies, Colombo was suggesting to knowledgeable readers that he had opened far more bodies than would have been officially allowed. This would, in turn, imply that he had greater knowledge of the human body and accuracy in describing it than his competitors who did not go to such lengths. The postmortem on Loyola, which appeared in this section, was therefore part of a statement about Colombo’s extensive knowledge acquired through firsthand investigation.
Colombo’s narrative of Loyola’s postmortem clearly emphasized his personal experience with anatomy and his extensive knowledge of the human body. He made it clear that he, rather than a surgeon or barber, opened the body and handled Loyola’s entrails, stating that he “extracted with these hands innumerable stones from his penis and found stones of various colors in his lungs, liver, and in the vena porta.… I saw moreover pebbles in the urinary duct in the bladder, in the colon, in the hemorrhoidal vein and in his navel area.”70 Although these were unusual details, Colombo stated he had seen other bodies with similar problems.71 The narrative, then, advertised Colombo’s expertise: he had been invited to open the eminent leader of the Jesuit order, had performed the autopsy with his own hands, and found details that might be unusual to other anatomists, but which were familiar to him. The saint’s anatomy was important not because of any miracle—in fact, Colombo explicitly states that Loyola’s unusual anatomy is within the realm of the natural—but because it demonstrated Colombo’s skill and the ability of the new anatomists to understand variation within the human body.
In contrast, Loyola’s fellow Jesuit and attendant during his final illness, Giovanni Polanco, immediately interpreted the anatomical details in a religious light. His narrative of the postmortem appeared in a letter Polanco initially sent to the superiors of the Jesuit order. Shortly thereafter, this letter circulated in anonymous copies. That it was widely distributed can be surmised from the fact that copies survive in Latin, Spanish, and Italian versions.72 The Jesuits’ attempt to disseminate the knowledge of Loyola’s anatomy suggests that even at this early stage, anatomy could demonstrate his sanctity. Furthermore, circulating Polanco’s observations in a letter full of firsthand experience suggests that these Jesuits actively engaged in the epistemic genre of Observationes in an attempt to make knowledge about the holy.
According to Polanco, the autopsy provided evidence that Loyola had lived a remarkably ascetic life. Polanco’s letter states that, upon opening Loyola’s body, the physicians “discovered that his stomach and intestines were quite small and without anything inside them.” The physicians then declared that they understood these irregularities to be a sign of the great feats of self-denial that Loyola had undertaken.73 The numerous stones found in Colombo’s body were reinterpreted as part of this narrative: Loyola’s extreme asceticism had made his liver harden and produce stones.74 These stones would, in turn, have been painful to bear. Thus, Loyola’s anatomy demonstrated that he had lived a life of extreme ascetic rigor that caused a great deal of unseen hardship for the holy man.
This anatomical demonstration of Loyola’s asceticism may have been especially necessary, since other accounts did not cast Loyola as bearing his final illness with the heroic patience of a saint. His friend Pedro Ribadeneira, who wrote the first posthumous biography of the saint, depicted Loyola as so “surrounded and oppressed by infirmities” that he wanted to “see himself with Christ,” that is, die.75 This yearning for death because of his pain was in contrast to the advice Loyola himself had given a friend just two years earlier. Loyola told his friend that an illness was “an occasion for merit and the exercise of virtue” in patient forbearance.76 That Loyola was in so much pain that he wished for death implied that he was not, in fact, bearing his pain with virtuous patience. Furthermore, as Ribadeneira noted, “the doctors [medici] did not make much of Ignatius’s illness, as it seemed to them to be his ordinary sickness.”77 That medical practitioners ignored the call of the famous leader of the Jesuits when he was ill, claiming that it was just his “ordinary sickness,” indicates that Loyola regularly called doctors unnecessarily. In this depiction by his friend and well-disposed biographer, the holy man appears more sensitive to his personal discomfort than a true ascetic should have been. Colombo’s autopsy, as reported by Polanco, vindicated Loyola as someone who bore with extreme patience his bodily infirmities.
Importantly for Loyola’s saintly reputation, the autopsy also uncovered Loyola’s first postmortem miracle. Polanco reported that, given his anatomy, Loyola only “lived due to a miracle for a great deal of time, since with a liver such as that, it would not be possible to live unless our Lord God, in providing for the necessities of the Company [of Jesus], made up for the weakness of his bodily organs and maintained him in life.”78 That is, Loyola’s stones should have killed him long before; therefore God must have, through divine intervention, performed a continuous miracle through Loyola’s body to keep him alive. Autopsy had uncovered new and hidden miracles.
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