Around 1600 Leiden University had a major tourist attraction:the anatomical theatre. Here, doctors dissected the corpses of criminals in public. Not because of the sensation but because knowledge of man would lead to an understanding of creation and God. This happened in several places in Europe. However, Leiden was a special case, according to recent research.
The sixteenth of February 1595 was a cold day. Groups of people flocked to the Faliedebagijnekerk in Leiden under the chiming of church bells. This secularized chapel on a beguinage on the Rapenburg housed the university's recently completed anatomical theater. Here, students and other spectators could watch a professor perform anatomical sections on corpses on a central stage. The chime announced that a section was about to begin. The corpse, an executed criminal, had been collected the day before by the anatomical assistant from the bailiff of Overveen.
The professor of anatomy Petrus Paaw who was to carry out the autopsy could not have wished for a better opening winter for his anatomy site:this was the third corpse that had been made available for dissection since December and the extremely low temperatures that winter also ensured a natural preservation of the bodies, which made long dissection sessions possible.
Paaw's public anatomical demonstrations were among the highlights of the year, not just for the university but for the whole of Leiden. Other lectures were canceled so that students and professors from all faculties could experience the analysis. Leiden surgeons and their students visited them, as did dignitaries from within and outside the city and interested citizens who had paid fifteen stuivers for admission. According to a certain ranking, this mixed audience of about two hundred people took place in the circular stands of the theatre.
The theater was lit in the dark winter months with sconces and candles, sometimes perfumed to mask the smell of decay. A pentagonal candelabra with a candle on each corner shone on the section table. The corpse was covered with a black sheet before the autopsy and during intermissions. A dissection usually lasted several days. Step by step the anatomist, or a surgeon working on the anatomist's directions, opened the body, usually starting at the organs in the abdominal cavity and ending at the head. As so-called subjectum anatomicum preferably served an executed criminal from out of town, so that the body on the dissection table would remain more or less anonymous to the public.
Visual education
With the construction of this theater, Leiden University was in line with international developments. Anatomical theaters sprang up throughout Europe as a result of the increasing interest in man and his body that had come to dominate the arts and science during the Renaissance. Closely related to this was the emergence in the 16th century of anatomical illustration, the anatomical atlas and of public stages where the dissection of human bodies could be seen 'live'. Inspired by Roman structures such as the Colosseum and the Arena of Verona, Alexander Benedict of the University of Padua in his Anatomia, sive historia corporis humani described (1502) the ideal theater for such illustrative instruction in anatomy. It had to have a circular shape, with rising stands so that as many people as possible had a good view of the section on a table below in the middle of the room.
Such anatomical theaters appeared in various places in Europe over the course of the century. Initially these were temporary structures, which were demolished after the section. However, in 1584, the University of Padua opened a permanent theater especially for the demonstration of human anatomy.
Leiden University also decided on such a theatrum anatomicum . in 1591 to set up. This was done as part of an extensive modernization program. Other innovations were the hortus botanicus, the university library and even a university fencing school. This round of modernization so soon after the university was founded in 1575 was related to the dwindling student numbers. With the foundation of the University of Franeker in 1585, Leiden had lost its monopoly within the Protestant regions. At the same time, due to the distance between the Southern and Northern Netherlands, fewer Flemings went to study in Leiden. The new facilities, widely reported in the publicity with prints and books, were intended to guarantee the influx of students to Leiden.
Vest pocket size
The driving force behind the innovation within the medical faculty was Petrus Paaw. He had begun his studies in 1581 and as a third year undertook an academic pilgrimage to a number of European universities. Besides the question of whether he was welcome as a Protestant northerner, his fascination with anatomy probably played a part in choosing the cities he visited. This profession got off to a bad start in Leiden because the city had not until then made the arrangements that made it possible to dissect human bodies.
Paaw's first destination on his study trip was therefore Paris, where the surgeons' guild was allowed to dissect four bodies a year. A little over a year later, he left for Rostock, a Lutheran university that also had an anatomical practice. Paaw obtained his doctorate there in 1585 and was given a position as a lecturer at the medical faculty.
The last stop was Padua, where the University of the Republic of Venice was located. A logical destination. Due to the religious tolerance of the Venetian Republic, this university attracted many northern Protestant students. Moreover, Padua had a reputation to uphold as a progressive center of anatomical science. Alexander Benedict had developed his theories on anatomical theatres, but the father of modern anatomy Andreas Vesalius had also given tumultuous anatomical demonstrations around 1540, and his groundbreaking anatomical atlas De humani corporis fabrica (Seven books on the structure of the human body, from 1543) prepared. And when Paaw arrived in Padua in 1588, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente was professor of anatomy. He is also one of the great names of anatomy.
Paaw undoubtedly attended an anatomical demonstration by Fabricius. The sections were in the first permanent anatomical theater from 1584. We do not know what this looked like. There are no images of it.
In 1589, Petrus Paaw returned to Leiden, armed with an extensive and up-to-date knowledge of anatomical science, both theoretical and practical. In the meantime, the university here had expanded the teaching mandate of the medical professor Gerard de Bont in 1586 with the practical demonstration of anatomy – probably prompted by concern about the declining student numbers. In addition, at the same time, the city council decreed that the dissection training and examinations of surgeons and their students should be supervised by a professor. This task was also assigned to De Bont.
However, it seems that this extensive range of tasks was outgrowing De Bont. When the ambitious young anatomist Paaw applied for an appointment at the university, a professorship in surgery and anatomy was quickly created for him.
Shortly afterwards, in the winter of 1589, he did his first public section in Leiden. The university archives mention costs incurred for trestles, tables and benches 'totter anatomy'. This concerned a temporary anatomical theater in the Faliedebagijnekerk. Apparently this location was a good fit, because when the university decided to make the facility permanent in 1591, they designated the Faliedebagijnekerk for that purpose. In 1593 a patent from the States of Holland and Zeeland arranged for the corpses of executed criminals to become available for this purpose.
It took a while before the theater was ready. In October 1594, Paaw urged the university board to '_make sure that locus anatomicus might someday be completed_'. December 1594 it was delivered. This first permanent anatomical theater above the Alps, with its central dissection table surrounded by seven circular and cascading galleries, was an antique pocket-sized Roman arena, just as Alexander Benedict had recommended in 1502.
Vanitas
We have already seen that the audience for dissections was not made up of mere medics. This indicates that the content of the anatomical lessons transcended the purely medical. The demonstration and explanation of the anatomist was not only about anatomical knowledge, but also about inciting contemplation about human existence, about transience, and about the question of how man can fulfill his stay on earth as usefully as possible. This moralism fits in with the humanistic world of thinking, which focuses on man in both his physical and mental aspects.
The combination of anatomy with a ideological morality was not limited to the oral explanation of the sections. In the Leiden theatrum anatomicum, Also open to the public outside the anatomy season during the winter months, from 1598 on, an arrangement of skeletons of humans and animals devised by Pauw was on display:as an anatomical and as a moral lesson. Andreas Vesalius had done something similar in some illustrations of his De humani corporis fabrica, in which skeletons refer to the transience of life through posture and gesture. Petrus Paaw seems to have been the first to shape this Vanitas symbolism into a three-dimensional tableau vivant (or tableau mort). He placed the human skeletons on the top balustrade of the theater. They were given flags with moralistic platitudes like memento mori, nosce te ipsum and pulvis et umbra sumus in the hands. To reinforce the message of impermanence, two were dressed as Adam and Eve, "_imagining that through the probe of our first ancestors death has come upon all men_".
After 1600 the anatomical theater also housed an anatomical cabinet, with sights such as three human skins stretched on a wooden frame, the skull of a Moor with an exceptionally thick skull roof and '_the blaes van denwijtvermaerden lord Isaac Casaubon_' sent to Paaw from London . Paaw's successor expanded the collection of curiosities from 1618, with maps, history prints and prints with mythological scenes inside the theatrum, ethnographic objects from all parts of the world and antiquities such as Egyptian mummies and Roman amphorae. It was his ambition to construct within the walls of the Leiden anatomical theater a representation of all creation – or at least the sublunar part of it – including the microcosm of the human body, revealed by the secateurs.
The wonder-room character of the anatomical theater grew stronger in the course of the 17th century, while the importance of the theater as a medical demonstration space declined. This had to do with developments in science. Anthology started to focus more and more on the processes of life in the tissues of the body. They worked with anatomical preparations of blood and lymphatic systems, injected with mercury and wax and stored on alcohol in glass bottles. Physiological experiments on live animals became important. You didn't need an anatomical theater for that.
In the 18th century, the theater was hardly used for dissection demonstrations. It did attract many visitors, but they came for the collection of curiosities. The anatomical assistant would then show them around for a fee and tell a beautiful story for each object, which was not necessarily true. The proceeds from the sale of catalogs describing the collection of curiosities also went to the anatomy assistant. Around 1750, for example, the anatomical theatre, once one of the jewels in the crown of Leiden University, had become a dubious tourist attraction, operated by a servant. The curtain finally fell in 1821, when the theater had to make way for an extension of the university library.
However, the theatrum anatomicum did not have much time to fall into oblivion. The historiography of science took off in the 19th century. Initially, this new historical discipline mainly sang about Dutch scientific achievements and heroes, and in this the theater of Leiden was given a place that it would never relinquish. Since 1991, Museum Boerhaave, the national museum for the history of science, has been able to admire a full-size reconstruction of the theatrum, including skeletons with flags.