Does reason, they ask, prescribe the same as experience, or something different? If the same, it must be needless; if different, it must be mischievous. “But what remains is also cruel, to cut open the abdomen and præcordia of living men, and make that art, which presides over the health of mankind, the instrument, not only of inflicting death, but of doing it in the most horrid manner; especially if it be considered that some of those things which are sought after with so much barbarity cannot be known at all, and others may be known without any cruelty: for that the colour, smoothness, softness, hardness, and such like, are not the same in a wounded body as they were in a sound one; and further, because these qualities, even in bodies that have suffered no external violence, are often changed by fear, grief, hunger, indigestion, fatigue, and a thousand other inconsiderable disorders, which makes it much more probable that the internal parts, which are far more tender, and never exposed to the light itself, are changed by the severest wounds and mangling. And that nothing can be more ridiculous than to imagine anything to be the same in a dying man, nay, one already dead, as it is in a living person; for that the abdomen may indeed be opened while a man breathes, but as soon as the knife has reached the præcordia, and the transverse septum is cut, which by a kind of membrane divides the upper from the lower parts (and by the Greeks is called the diaphragm), the man immediately expires; and then the præcordia, and all the viscera, never come to the view of the butchering physician till the man is dead; and they must necessarily appear as such of a dead person, and not as they were while he lived; and thus the physician gains only the opportunity of murdering a man cruelly, and not of observing what are the appearances of the viscera in a living person. If, however, there can be anything which can be observed in a person which yet breathes, chance often throws it in the way of such as practise the healing art; for that sometimes a gladiator on the stage, a soldier in the field, or a traveller beset by robbers, is so wounded that some internal part, different in different people, may be exposed to view; and thus a prudent physician finds their situation, position, order, figure, and the other particulars he wants to know, not by perpetrating murder, but by attempting to give health; and learns by compassion that which others had discovered by horrid cruelty. That for these reasons it is not necessary to lacerate even dead bodies; which, though not cruel, yet may be shocking to the sight; since most things are different in dead bodies; and even the dressing of wounds shows all that can be discovered in the living” (Futvoye’s Translation).[422]