Now this was a new notion. It was not uncommon for the body to be opened after death, especially in the case of great personages, either for the purpose of embalming or for discovering (as it was supposed) the fact of poison or other foul play; and occasionally a physician would obtain permission for a like inspection when something unusual in the symptoms had excited a laudable curiosity to ascertain their cause. But the records of such inspections in the 17th century by Bartolinus, or Tulpius, or Bonetus, or, in our own country, by Mayerne, or Bate, or Morton, are fragmentary, their object being limited to the individual case. There was no attempt to search out the secrets of Nature in disease by a systematic observation of the state of the organs after death, nor was there for more than a century
anatomical effects of prolonged sickness often are. Indeed, I am confident that the opening and thorough inspection of one dead body, which has been wasted by slow disease or by infection, is of more real service to the art of healing than the dissection of ten corpses of healthy criminals.
