They almost certainly never chose to end up on the page like this: right through to the nineteenth century, many people resisted the prospect of being dissected. One reason was that they believed in physical resurrection in the afterlife; no one wants to rise into heaven as an empty torso or a flapping curtain of shredded nerves and muscles. The prospect of helping anatomical students to learn—far from being something to “delight” in, as the Padua motto had it—was considered a powerful deterrent to crime, almost more so than execution itself.
