ABSTRACT
The history of human anatomy is closely linked to the history of dissection of the human body, because the development of anatomical concepts has been heavily dependent upon access to human bodies. Just as the history of human anatomy posed innumerable queries for the societies in which those developments took place, so contemporary human anatomy in its broadest context provides an important forum for the consideration of ethical and social questions emanating from the uses society makes of human bodies, including organs and tissues. Galen's views became immutable, being transformed into an orthodoxy that, in the eyes of the Medieval scientists, supplanted the need to carry out further investigations. The major morbid elements in the history of human anatomical study in Britain are well-known, revolving as these did around body snatching and murder. Essentially the same events and struggles took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States.
