ABSTRACT
One final introductory point remains to be made, which concerns the attitude of the Catholic Church. In the late nineteenth century secular propagandists for science, who had themselves usually been raised in the Protestant traditions of America and Britain, constructed a history of science that presented scientists as the good guys and the Church, especially the Catholic Church, as the bad guys. The most famous books presenting this case were John William Draper’s History of the conflict between religion and science, published in 1874, and Andrew Dickson White’s A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom,
published in 1896. Although this interpretation was put forward so long ago, the dichotomy it deploys (Christianity/science) still underlies the stories of the history of science that historians tell today, however nuanced our accounts may be about the relation of science to religion or the relation of the Church to the knowledge of nature.12 According to this story the Catholic Church had supposedly forbidden all investigation into nature that was not directly based upon Biblical and Church teachings. One of the primary areas in which the Catholic Church had exercised this supposed censorship was anatomy.
