Throughout the fifteenth century the barber-surgeons and surgeons appear to have remained on fairly amicable terms, presumably carrying on much the same sort of practice. The surgeons, who took precedence on occasions of solemnities and festivities, were perhaps somewhat better trained, but nowhere is there any record that such training required the study of human anatomy.[6] One learned the trade by apprenticeship to a surgeon and by consulting textbooks of surgery. From surviving manuscripts it is possible to determine what these textual guides were: primarily such as those of the celebrated fourteenth-century surgeons, Gui de Chauliac and Henri de Mondeville. It is true that late medieval surgeons were accustomed to introduce the surgical subject by a short anatomical preface, medieval in character, the result of cursory and incomplete post-mortem examinations, but hardly sufficient to permit a proper grasp of anatomy even were that possible of attainment from literary sources. Hence the opening of the Tudor dynasty in England witnessed a medicine and a surgery lacking the essential and fundamental knowledge of the human structure. The traditions of English medicine were medieval, and medieval medicine had not concerned itself especially with anatomy. If we compare continental medicine of the same period the situation is found to be considerably different. In the course of the fifteenth century anatomy was being practised—diffidently to be sure, but nevertheless recognized and employed in Paris where the first human dissection, in the form of a brief autopsy, had been performed in 1407.[7] The first human anatomy mentioned in the _Commentaries_ of the Medical Faculty of Paris was performed in 1477-8 on the body of an executed criminal,[8] but the incident is recorded without any suggestion of its being a novelty and so raises the possibility that there may have been other dissections in previous years. The practice of human anatomy was even earlier in Italy where there is record of an autopsy in 1286,[9] and in 1316 Mundinus, called the ‘Restorer of Anatomy’, completed his _Anothomia_ in which he describes his systematic dissection of the human body. Official decree permitted the practice of human dissection in many cities, especially those with medical schools, and such official recognition was granted at Bologna in 1405[10] and at Padua in 1429.[11] Elsewhere similar recognition of human dissection was obtained at Montpellier in 1340,[12] at Lerida in 1391,[13] at Vienna in 1435,[14] and at Tübingen in 1485.[15] As a consequence, by the opening of the sixteenth century a series of anatomical texts, based in varying degrees upon human dissection, began to appear, such as those of Benedetti, Achillini, and Berengario da Carpi.