much as columbus’ landing in the new world was once painted as a triumph against flat-earth dogma, historians have long claimed that a papal decree forbade dissection during the middle ages until vesalius boldly defied it by performing dissections in secret. in fact, no such decree ever existed, but the old bad pope, good scientist myth was reinforced. even though dissections weren’t so subversive it’s still useful that today we have the nih’s visible human, an open-source compendium of three-dimensional scans of male and female bodies with a plethora of visualization tools at our disposal:
