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Here and there among the great anatomists of the period we read of an experiment, but it was the art of observation, the art of Hippocrates, not the science of Galen, not the carefully devised experiment to determine function, that characterized their work.
It was more rarely met with than the orange-breasted variety; but the natives, generally better guides than the anatomists in the matter of specific distinctions, stoutly maintained that there were two kinds; and the Dyak bee-hunter whose interest had been secured by the ample reward already bestowed upon him promised them, that if they would go with him to a certain district of country, he would show them the larger species of bruang.
To this end he authorized his anatomists to make vivisections both of animals, and also of criminals who had been condemned to death, herein finding for himself that royal road in physiology which Euclid once told him, at a dinner in the Museum, did not exist in geometry, and defending the act from moral criticism by the plea that, as the culprits had already forfeited their lives to the law, it was no injury to make them serviceable to the interests of humanity.
I have known great anatomists and physiologists as careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truth of political economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence, and that something more than a knowledge of the received principles of physiology is necessary to bring others into a course of perfect sobriety and general obedience to the laws of health.
Indeed, its truth was quite inconsistent with the ideas everywhere entertained in the schools on the functions of the heart and other viscera, and was destructive of many favorite theories. The new doctrine, therefore, as may well be supposed, was received by most of the anatomists of the period with distrust, and by all with surprise.
The dullest modern student, brought up among casts and manuals, would not be guilty of the actual anatomical mistakes committed every now and then by these great anatomists, so passionately curious of internal structure, so exquisitely faithful to minute peculiarity, let alone the bunglings of men so certain of their pencil, so exquisitely keen to form, as Botticelli.
Anatomists do very much vary in their opinion concerning this, some denying any such thing to be in the delivery of the woman, and others on the contrary affirming it; but experience has testified there is such a thing, for Bartholomew Carbrolius, the ordinary doctor of anatomy to the College of Physicians at Montpellier in France, records the history of a maid, whose water being a long time stopped, at last issued out through the navel.
It may, indeed, be recalled that even in the name nymphæ anatomists commonly apply to the labia minora there is generally believed to be a poetic allusion to the Nymphs who presided over streams, since the labia minora exert an influence on the direction of the urinary stream.
It had its design and action upon other intended victims also; but of them there is, at present, no need to speak. The introduction of a real corpse procured from a person who supplied the Parisian anatomists involved no real danger, while it heightened the mystery and kept the prophet alive in the gossip of the town and in the thoughts of the noodles with whom he had conferred.
But among other causes of barrenness of men, this also is one, and makes them almost of the nature of eunuchs, and that is the incision or the cutting of the veins behind their ears, which in case of distempers is oftentimes done; for, according to the opinions of most physicians and anatomists, the seed flows from the brain by those veins behind the ears, more than any part of the body.
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