Genre:

Introduction; Extract, Discourse, Drollery

Publications extracted:

Lorenzo Pignotti

Subjects:

Anatomy, Dissection, Gender, Nomenclature, Instruments

    Having introduced the anatomical subject of the discourse, the narrator declares: 'I will not distress your eyes with the disgusting spectacle of an amphitheatre; I will not wound your ears with those hard technical words, which it was useless labour to go so far to seek, for the purpose of rendering them so difficult to the tongue and so disagreeable to the ear'. The narrator describes the public dissection of 'the heart of a young and beautiful woman' by a professor of anatomy. There is found no 'correspondence between the heart and tongue of the deceased'. (173) Other such anatomical peculiarities are described. The heart 'floated habitually in a limpid and cold liquid, containing a soft substance'. The professor collected some of this in a tube, and found it behaved like mercury in a thermometer, rising and falling as young fops or men of sense were brought near to it. A physician friend of the narrator assured him that 'all young women are so many thermometers, or rather frivolimeters of that kind'. (174)