Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

HIS DISSECTION OF FISH 115heart being above the lungs, the emptiness of the occiput,etc.—can hardly be casual slips made by one famiUar withhuman dissection. The passage, however, in Nat. Hist., VII. 3,points distinctly to his having to some degree dissected the foetus.But this would not conflict with the third and weightiestreason, namely the strong repugnance felt by the Greeks toany mutilation of the body proper and any neglect of speedyburial. The sad appeal of the shade of the unburied Patroclus(//., XXIII. 71 ff.) :" Bury me with all speed that I pass thegates of Hades. Far off the spirits banish me, nor do thephantoms of men outworn suffer me to mingle with them beyondthe river," the fervent desire of some of Homer's Heroes thatfuneral rites should promptly follow their death, 1 and theagony of Antigone, all these and other instances manifestGreek sentiment. So strong and widespread was thisthat human dissection would have certainly aroused intensebitterness and probably caused the perpetual banishment ofthe perpetrator. The suggestion, resting on no evidence,that Aristotle dissected the human body secretly can neitherbe proved, nor disproved.The Japanese, till recently, also refrained from dissection ofthe human body. It was not till the arrival in 1873 of ProfessorW. Donitz to fill the Chair of Anatomy in the newly establishedAcademy of Medicine in Tokyo that dissection first came tobe employed.This new era of medical science started under thehappiest circumstances, for frequent hangings, an aftermathof internal strife, provided ample material for its prosecution. 2^ " The belief, common later, that the soul of the dead was not admittedimmediately to the realm of Hades, but wandered in loneliness on its confinesuntil the body was either burned or buried, is clearly expressed only in this(Patroclus) passage, while possibly in only one other can it be assumed, inall the Homeric poems. The wish for speedy rites sprang from a simplercause ; men did not want to have the bodies of their friends, or of themselves,torn by wild beasts or vultures ; nor does this even begin to show that theyhad inherited old beliefs with regard to the connection between the soul ofthe dead and the body, which this soul had once inhabited, leading to a certaintreatment of the body. That in earlier times, and perhaps by many Greeksof Homer's age, the soul was thought to maintain a species of connection withthe body, and to care for it, cannot be doubted. But caution is necessarythat it may not be assumed that the Greeks, who maintained certain customs,inherited also the beliefs on which those customs were originally based "(Seymour, op. cit., p. 462).* Professor G. H. Nuttall, in Parasitology (1913), V. 253.