Why did the ancient Greeks avoid human dissection?

In the ancient world, people reasoned about the interior of the body without relying on insights gleaned from human dissection. This is true, at least, for the most part. There was a moment early in the 200s BC, in the Hellenistic period (323 - 31 BC), when a few thinkers in Alexandria did perform human dissection — and, in fact, human vivisection, too. However, once these thinkers had died, their insights into human internal anatomy died with them. A short-lived Greek experiment with human dissection was over, and philosophers and scientists returned to thinking about the body in other ways.

I want to talk about why they avoided dissection in the first place.

We can list some of the smaller reasons first. For instance, before the invention of rubber gloves, dissection was dangerous: there could be infections, for instance, and even though the Greeks did not have a correct understanding of the causes of these infections, it is a normal and obvious thing that corpses can be the sources of disease.

Moreover, there wasn’t always an incentive to do dissection. Merely observing the inside of the body can’t straightforwardly help you cure, or even diagnose, diseases. Today, we have a practice of conducting autopsies to help us understand how and why someone died. Autopsies are the result of important scientific achievements in the eighteenth century AD, in the field known as morbid anatomy. Researchers in Padua, Italy, and at Saint George’s Hospital, London, England discovered ways of systematically interpreting observations in autopsies as clues to more accurately diagnose diseases in living patients.

In other words, there is a lot of distance between observing something in a corpse and diagnosing diseases, let alone curing a patient. It took a lot of important scientific work to make dissections useful for medicine.

However, these are the smaller reasons, as I said. They can’t be the whole explanation. First, even if human dissections were dangerous, so were animal dissections, and animal dissections were done in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Second, even philosophers who were not interested in using insights into human internal anatomy for medicine nevertheless avoided dissection. Consider, for instance, Plato (428 - 348 BC): his Timaeus would have benefited tremendously from knowing more about internal anatomy. He is ignorant of many organs altogether, such as the pancreas, and his views of physiology often make no sense because he is unaware of important anatomical structures. A striking example: he believes that the woman’s womb wanders throughout her body, causing all sorts of ailments. He is unaware of the broad ligaments that anchor the womb in place.

These ligaments were first observed in a human being in Alexandria early in the Hellenistic period when a few researchers, as I mentioned earlier, were conducting dissection.

So, why did the Greeks avoid human dissection?

The answer is that, in addition to the smaller reasons above, the Greeks had an incredibly powerful taboo against being around corpses.

In the ancient Greek worldview, certain actions and situations could cause a person to be polluted in a religious sense. This pollution was called miasma, from which we get our English word ‘miasma’. This pollution would have to be cleansed by means of rituals, or else you, your household, or even the entire city, depending on the situation, would suffer.

How did you get polluted? There were many ways. Menstruating women were sources of pollution; giving birth was a source of pollution; committing some crimes was a source of pollution; and being near corpses was a way of being polluted.

Teles (200s BC), an early Hellenistic philosopher, explained: “we [i.e., Greeks] shrink both from looking at and from touching corpses.”

This taboo was so strong that on the sacred island of Delos, dying was illegal. It was even illegal to bury corpses on the island.

Let me illustrate with an example. Let’s say that a family member died in your house. At the exact moment of the death, the house becomes polluted. You’d have to place a water vessel outside your house to let everyone around you know not to come near the house because of the pollution. The water couldn’t come from your house because your house’s water was itself polluted. The men of the household wouldn’t go near the corpse at all, but it would be the women’s responsibility to purify the corpse (as much as possible) by properly anointing it. They’d carry the corpse outside the city limits. Having a corpse in the city limits would lead to the pollution that they were trying to avoid, and they’d carry the corpse outside before dawn in order that no innocent passersby would get polluted by happening to run into the procession. There wouldn’t be a priest at the burial because the priest needed to avoid the pollution.

Why did all of this develop? Well, perhaps it was because of the point I mentioned earlier: these are all good practices for preventing the spread of diseases. Especially if the person had died of a communicable disease, you’d want the corpse to come into contact with as few people as possible, and you’d want to dispose of the corpse far away from where people live.

That’s a good explanation of why the Greeks developed this taboo about corpses. Some readers might be familiar with Antigone, a well-known 5th-century-BC tragedy by Sophocles (497 - 406 BC). In this tragedy, Antigone is forbidden from burying the corpse of one of her brothers who had rebelled against the city of Thebes. The pollution that results from the unburied corpse is disastrous for Thebes because the gods stop receiving Theban sacrifices. This is a pretty compelling warning against leaving corpses unburied and in public.

If that was the intention behind the creation of these superstitions, that makes sense. There was another consequence, perhaps an unintended one: no human dissections. The net result was a lot of confusion about human internal anatomy that persisted for centuries, in spite of the brief exception at the start of the 3rd century BC in Alexandria in which human dissection was performed.