ABSTRACT
Our story will not be primarily about things found^ as is usual in histories of anatomy, but about projects of inquiry as undertaken by certain anatomists. Our main story will be about the recovery and reintroduction into practice by the Moderns of the sixteenth century, of what they believed to have been the anatomical projects of the Ancients. The Ancients, of course, are the people of classical Greece and Rome. It is therefore necessary for us first to have some understanding of the anatomical projects of the Ancients who engaged in anatomy or whose writings were significant for subsequent anatomizing, taking them chronologically. As explained in the Introduction, since historians of anatomy have hitherto tended to see all anatomical enterprise in the past as part of just one monolithic anatomical project stretching from Antiquity to the present, no historian has looked at the distinctiveness of the anatomical projects of the Ancients before. I present the different ancient anatomical projects here in a direct manner and without polemical argument against the views of other historians. I have established the characteristics of these projects by looking at what the Ancients in question were actually doing in anatomy, and taking seriously what they said they were doing, where this can be discovered.
