Welcome to this episode of God Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. We tend to think of

medieval medicine as pretty crude and uninformed and in some cases that was definitely true.

There was a growing fascination though with the human body and how it works.

Taylor McCall is the managing editor at Speculum, the Journal of Medieval Studies, and Taylor holds a PhD in medieval art history from Cambridge.

And Taylor's brand new book, The Art of Anatomy, takes a look at the flourishing medical field of anatomy through the medium of the images left behind to us by medieval artists.

Welcome to God medieval Taylor, it's great to have you on here.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

I'm looking forward to talking about this very interesting subject.

And from the book, some of the diagrams are pretty odd, interesting, unique.

Yes, absolutely, yep.

So how early does the study of anatomy as we might recognize it today? How early does that begin?

The earliest study of anatomy that we have, which is from ancient Greece.

It was the experiments of two men called Herophilus and Erasmstratus.

They actually performed human dissection,

but we only know about that through the intermediary of a later Roman historian

who tells us about it.

There was actually no tradition of anatomical study as we might think of it really until the middle ages and the later middle

ages at that. I think we think of the study of anatomy as being really tied to

human dissection and of course the field of medicine and it's an

integral part of medical training for future doctors but for the actual history of medicine and history of anatomy, the re-establishment

of human dissection is the crux of my work, and that didn't happen until approximately

1300. So over 1,300.

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