ABSTRACT

Sebastián de Covarrubias’ famous Spanish dictionary (Madrid, 1611) included an entry on Anatomia, which was described as ‘the flaying and opening of a human body, which is made in order to study its inner parts and structure. It is a very necessary thing for the physicians and surgeons; and in the universities there are chairs of this discipline, which is carried out on the bodies of executed criminals, and those who die in hospitals, and other particular persons. And in their place it can also be carried out on a monkey and a pig, to show the inner parts, such as the heart, the entrails, and the intestines’. 1 Anatomy was evidently still seen as a thriving branch of learning in Spain, even though the momentum of the previous century had often become more sluggish or even discontinued by the beginning of the 1600s. It has been the aim of this study to shed some light on this neglected area in the history of early modern anatomy. A systematic examination of anatomy in sixteenth-century Spain has focused on its introduction, maintenance and, in many cases, later decay and abandonment. This study has demonstrated both regional variations and general tendencies in the institutionalisation of anatomy as a novel medical discipline taught at, and occasionally even beyond, the principal Iberian universities and hospitals. The creation of new university chairs between 1552 and 1583 represented a significant innovation and expansion of contemporary medical practice and education with no Iberian precedents apart from the University of Valencia.