ABSTRACT
Alastair V. Campbell’s own approach to the human body was succinctly expressed in his book, The Body in Bioethics, where he eloquently set out the importance of paying serious attention to the significance of the human body for bioethical debate. Secrecy was integral to the outlook of anatomists, since divulging to the public what the dissection of human bodies entailed may alienate them and force anatomists to justify what they did to the bodies at their disposal. Vesalius was the epitome of the critical scientist, who stopped relying upon a reading of Galen and his traditional view of the body and based his knowledge of anatomy on direct study of the human body itself. Vesalius’s insistence on studying the human body itself was a move into uncharted territory, dependent entirely upon a ready supply of dead human bodies, since the human body cannot be known from reflection alone.
