Les limites du cadavre. La tentation de la vivisection humaine, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles

Abstract

The cadaver and its exploration have been seen as limiting access to knowledge ever since the Renaissance. In the early modern period, anatomists and surgeons recurrently pointed out the ways in which the corpse seemed to resist knowledge. As a consequence, medical men often evoked the question of vivisection, referring to ancient texts and to a case of vivisection supposed to have taken place in the Middle Ages. This paper will not try to find out the reality of such practices. Rather, it will examine the varied and changing uses of the issue of vivisection, as vivisection crystallized rhetorical, medical, historiographical and philosophical questions in the early modern period.

Keywords

• vivisection
• anatomy
• Celse
• cadaver