"But Dr. Walsh elsewhere falls back on the fact that shortly after the decree of Pope Boniface VIII., which struck so severe a blow at dissection, the Venetian Senate passed a decree ordaining that a dissection of the human body should be made every year in the city of Venice, and he leaves his readers to conclude that this effectually proves that dissection had not really been discouraged by the Pope. The very opposite conclusion would be deduced by anyone familiar with the relations between the Republic of Venice and the Papacy. These two powers were always struggling against each other; again and again the Venetian Republic, in maintaining its rights, braved the Papal interdicts. The fact that it allowed dissections, so far from proving that the Pope allowed them, would seem to prove that in this case, and in so many other cases, and especially that of {88} Vesalius of Padua, the Venetian Senate sought to show the Vatican that it would yield none of its rights to clerical control. This very fact--that Venice refused to be bound with regard to anatomical investigation by an order from the Vatican--seems to be entirely in the line with all the other facts in the case, which show that the Roman court had committed itself, most unfortunately, against the main means of progress in anatomy and medicine." Here then is the answer that a modern historian and educator makes to all the representations with regard to the development of anatomy and the practice of dissection during the Middle Ages. If the practice of dissection was permitted it was in spite of the Popes. The fact that there were a dozen of medical schools in Italy at which dissection was carried on is ignored. The great anatomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries simply did not exist--Dr. White knows nothing about them. There must be no admission that the Popes permitted dissection or any other form of science. Dr. White makes his last stand by a really marvelous tour d'esprit. It was Venice defying the Vatican that permitted dissection. This, he supposes, may help him, for anatomy did develop very wonderfully at Padua when it was Venetian territory. But, as pointed out by Roth, dissection was practiced very successfully, and the anatomical tradition established at Padua, before it came under the dominion of Venice. At all the other important cities of Italy dissection was carried on. We have given some of the evidence for Verona, for Pisa, for Naples, for Bologna, for Florence, and, be it remembered, even for Rome. Padua was the rival of Bologna in anatomy only for a comparatively short time. Bologna {89} always maintained a primacy in the field of anatomy, and never more so than after she became a Papal city at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Vesalius taught and demonstrated not at Padua alone, but also at Bologna and at Pisa. For two centuries Rome was the most successful rival of Bologna, _and hundreds of dissections were