by Claire Bubb received in 2023 the Young Historian Prize of AIHS-IAHS as one of the two awardees for her excellent book on dissection in classical antiquity.
Dissection in Classical Antiquity: A Social and Medical History, Cambridge: CUP, 2022
Dissection is a practice with a long history stretching back to antiquity and has played a crucial role in the development of anatomical knowledge. This absorbing book takes the story back to classical antiquity, employing a wide range of textual and material evidence. Claire Bubb reveals how dissection was practised from the Hippocratic authors of the fifth century BC through Aristotle and the Hellenistic doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus to Galen in the second century AD. She focuses on its material concerns and social contexts, from the anatomical subjects (animal or human) and how they were acquired, to the motivations and audiences of dissection, to its place in the web of social contexts that informed its reception, including butchery, sacrifice, and spectacle. The book is divided into two parts. Part I explores the social history of dissection: the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the recurring urge to open and examine bodies for anatomical knowledge. Part II turns to anatomical literature, the vehicle for presenting anatomical data, whether gleaned from dissection or otherwise; despite being a robust genre in antiquity, the majority of these texts have since been lost, and Bubb carefully reconstructs the missing links to offer a fuller picture. The book concludes with a coda, examining the practice of dissection and the development of anatomical literature in Late Antiquity.
