The Middle Ages had their share of amazing medical stories, but perhaps nothing was more unusual than a surgery that took place in Paris in the year 1475. A chronicle from that time reveals that not only did physicians perform a vivisection on a patient, but that the patient survived.
It has only been in recent years that the myth that people did not perform human dissections – cutting open a dead body to examine its internal parts – has been overturned. However, a vivisection – the cutting open of a living being – is an extremely rare form of medical experiment.
It is also one with very negative connotations. There are accounts from ancient Greece where physicians performed vivisections on criminals, and during the Second World War, the Nazis and Japanese also performed the procedure on captives. It has justifiably been seen as a cruel act. There are a couple of accounts from the Middle Ages where physicians note the possibility of human vivisections.
However, historians Vivian and Christine Nutton have discovered a case from the year 1475 of a vivisection being performed in Paris, France. Their research, published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, explains the story of the ‘Archer of Meudon’.
In the account from the French chronicler, a person only identified as a Free Archer from Meudon – a term describing peasants who were part of a royal militia – had been convicted of several thefts and a court in Paris had just denied his appeal. The archer was sentenced to be executed by hanging at a gallows, but then a petition arrived from Parisian physicians and surgeons. In their letter to King Louis XI, they explained that the archer was suffering from “stone, colic, pain, and sickness in the side” and this was similar to an illness afflicting Ymberrt de Batarnay, Sieur du Bouchage (1438-1523), an important councillor to the king.
According to the chronicle, the physicians explained:
it would be extremely useful to look at the sites where these diseases are formed in the human body, the best way of doing which was to cut open the body of a living man; and that this could conveniently be carried out on the person of the said archer, who was in any case about to be put to death.
The king must have granted the petition, for the chronicle next explains:
The appropriate opening and incision was made in the body of the archer, and the site of the diseases in question sought out and scrutinised inside him. And once they had been seen, he was sewn up again and his entrails put back in.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of this account is that the archer survived:
he received by order of the king, the very best of care and dressings, so good that within a fortnight he was completely restored to health, and had his conviction quashed, without costs, and indeed was given money besides.
This story of the Archer of Meudon had been known before, with vigorous debate about it in the 19th century, but historians back then ultimately decided that it was just a fable. It had then been mostly forgotten until taken up by Vivian and Christine Nutton, a husband-and-wife team with backgrounds in the history of medicine and French literature. They determined that even though it only appears in one chronicle from the 15th century, it is still a very plausible account. They note it was a detailed yet restrained description, with the absence of sensationalism or bias in the storytelling. It also falls in line with other details known about medicine in late medieval Paris, including that physicians there were very interested in doing dissections.
While it can never be fully known if the story of the Archer of Meudon is accurate, the Nuttons believe that should be taken seriously. It could like have been a procedure to remove a stone from the kidneys or bladder. They conclude by noting that dismissing the story as a legend “fails to do justice to the remarkable events it describes, to the complex development of the story itself, and to the light it throws on dissection in late-medieval Paris. Whether or not this is a true record of what took place in 1475, it deserves more than disdainful neglect.”
The article, “The Archer of Meudon: A Curious Absence of Continuity in the History of Medicine,” by Vivian and Christine Nutton, was published in 2003 in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. You can access it via Oxford Univerity Press. You can learn more about the work of Vivian Nutton through his personal website.
Top Image: Dissection scene, from ‘Le Livre des Proprietes des Choses’ by Barthelemy l’Anglais – Wikimedia Commons
The Middle Ages had their share of amazing medical stories, but perhaps nothing was more unusual than a surgery that took place in Paris in the year 1475. A chronicle from that time reveals that not only did physicians perform a vivisection on a patient, but that the patient survived.
It has only been in recent years that the myth that people did not perform human dissections – cutting open a dead body to examine its internal parts – has been overturned. However, a vivisection – the cutting open of a living being – is an extremely rare form of medical experiment.
It is also one with very negative connotations. There are accounts from ancient Greece where physicians performed vivisections on criminals, and during the Second World War, the Nazis and Japanese also performed the procedure on captives. It has justifiably been seen as a cruel act. There are a couple of accounts from the Middle Ages where physicians note the possibility of human vivisections.
However, historians Vivian and Christine Nutton have discovered a case from the year 1475 of a vivisection being performed in Paris, France. Their research, published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, explains the story of the ‘Archer of Meudon’.
In the account from the French chronicler, a person only identified as a Free Archer from Meudon – a term describing peasants who were part of a royal militia – had been convicted of several thefts and a court in Paris had just denied his appeal. The archer was sentenced to be executed by hanging at a gallows, but then a petition arrived from Parisian physicians and surgeons. In their letter to King Louis XI, they explained that the archer was suffering from “stone, colic, pain, and sickness in the side” and this was similar to an illness afflicting Ymberrt de Batarnay, Sieur du Bouchage (1438-1523), an important councillor to the king.
According to the chronicle, the physicians explained:
it would be extremely useful to look at the sites where these diseases are formed in the human body, the best way of doing which was to cut open the body of a living man; and that this could conveniently be carried out on the person of the said archer, who was in any case about to be put to death.
The king must have granted the petition, for the chronicle next explains:
The appropriate opening and incision was made in the body of the archer, and the site of the diseases in question sought out and scrutinised inside him. And once they had been seen, he was sewn up again and his entrails put back in.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of this account is that the archer survived:
he received by order of the king, the very best of care and dressings, so good that within a fortnight he was completely restored to health, and had his conviction quashed, without costs, and indeed was given money besides.
This story of the Archer of Meudon had been known before, with vigorous debate about it in the 19th century, but historians back then ultimately decided that it was just a fable. It had then been mostly forgotten until taken up by Vivian and Christine Nutton, a husband-and-wife team with backgrounds in the history of medicine and French literature. They determined that even though it only appears in one chronicle from the 15th century, it is still a very plausible account. They note it was a detailed yet restrained description, with the absence of sensationalism or bias in the storytelling. It also falls in line with other details known about medicine in late medieval Paris, including that physicians there were very interested in doing dissections.
While it can never be fully known if the story of the Archer of Meudon is accurate, the Nuttons believe that should be taken seriously. It could like have been a procedure to remove a stone from the kidneys or bladder. They conclude by noting that dismissing the story as a legend “fails to do justice to the remarkable events it describes, to the complex development of the story itself, and to the light it throws on dissection in late-medieval Paris. Whether or not this is a true record of what took place in 1475, it deserves more than disdainful neglect.”
The article, “The Archer of Meudon: A Curious Absence of Continuity in the History of Medicine,” by Vivian and Christine Nutton, was published in 2003 in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. You can access it via Oxford Univerity Press. You can learn more about the work of Vivian Nutton through his personal website.
Top Image: Dissection scene, from ‘Le Livre des Proprietes des Choses’ by Barthelemy l’Anglais – Wikimedia Commons
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