The basement of Paris’s hospital Hôtel-Dieu, where decaying human cadavers were dissected, was a dingy, airless, badly lit space with half-feral dogs roaming underneath the gurneys to gnaw on the drippings—a “meat market,” as Vesalius would describe one such anatomical chamber. The professors sat on “lofty chairs [and] cackle like jackdaws,” he wrote, while their assistants hacked and tugged through the body at random, eviscerating organs and parts as if pulling out cotton stuffing from a toy.
