ABSTRACT

This chapter reconstructs the making of one of the best known early modern collections of medical texts, Théophile Bonet’s Sepulchretum, and its purpose. Often seen as the epitome of bookish and conservative medicine at the time of major developments in anatomy, it was in fact crucial to establishing anatomia practica – the knowledge based on dissecting diseased bodies – as a discipline. Bonet’s editorial pursuit helped to create networks between physicians, especially across central and northern Europe. Making available and giving textual uniformity to the multifarious accounts of dissections produced over the centuries, the Sepulchretum promoted anatomia practica as an eminently communal enterprise at the intersection between anatomy and bedside medicine. Bringing fully into focus the collective nature of Bonet’s pursuit, the chapter also shows pathological dissections as an important resource with which physicians sought to give epistemological certainty to medical knowledge at a time when its conjectural nature was increasingly problematic.</abstract>