The Ghastly Kitchen - SAGE Journals

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HOS0010.1177/0073275315617769History of ScienceGuerrini

Article

The Ghastly Kitchen

HOS History of Science 2016, Vol. 54(1) 71–97 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0073275315617769 hos.sagepub.com

Anita Guerrini

Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

Abstract The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling. Keywords Kitchen, dissection, experimentation, animal experimentation, cooking, household, seventeenth century

The science of life … is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen. Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865, trans. 1927)

Introduction The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, according to Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. The ghastly kitchen – the nasty, messy place where anatomical knowledge might be gained – might not only have been a metaphor, but an actual space. In early modern Western

Corresponding author: Anita Guerrini, School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University, 322 Milam Hall, 2520 SW Campus Way, Corvallis, OR 97331 USA. Email: [email protected]

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Europe, and particularly in the seventeenth century, the kitchen, or a room in a private home that stood in for a kitchen, was quite often the site where the natural history of animals – observing, ordering and above all dissecting – occurred.1 This essay will argue that existing accounts of household science have overlooked dissection in the home and the importance of the kitchen. Drawing mainly on examples from England and France, it will show the various ways in which the kitchen might have been a resource for anatomical knowledge, a space where various skills and ideas could be developed. The actions that took place in kitchens included cooking, eating, tasting, and smelling, and its inhabitants included both humans and the animals that experimenters sacrificed on the arduous road to Bernard’s “lighted hall” of science. The evidence is largely circumstantial but it is suggestive. This essay will conclude with some reflections on the seventeenth-century kitchen as a “heterotopia.” By 1685, the Geneva physicians Daniel LeClerc and Jean-Jacques Manget, editors of the massive compendium Bibliotheca anatomica, could claim that the human body was largely known: few mysteries remained to be solved. Although LeClerc and Manget asserted the priority of human dissection in the discoveries of the seventeenth century, most of the concepts of function that they chronicled were based on the dissection of living and dead animals.2 In the past, most historians of anatomy focused on human dissection and therefore ultimately on medical goals. But, as many recent works have pointed out, most dissection in the seventeenth century paid little attention to questions of pathology; of much greater concern were questions about normal form and function.3 Anatomists used far more living and dead animals than human corpses to answer questions about the circulation of the blood, the nature of respiration and digestion, and the operation of the senses. Insofar as anatomy was experimental, dissection of living animals was critical. Here, I argue, is where the kitchen comes in. Steven Shapin noted many years ago that “The overwhelming majority of experimental trials, displays, and discussions that we know about occurred within private residences.”4 But we must sort out a number of definitions and categories relating to private residences as opposed to public institutions. The household constituted in many cases much more than a house. A country household could include servants’ quarters and outbuildings; in an urban space such as seventeenth-century London or Paris, in contrast, more than one household could occupy a single house.5 Deborah Harkness has argued that the “domestic sphere” of the household became a site for natural philosophy “for a relatively brief time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … [bridging] the gap between monastery and laboratory.”6 While this may have been true for the kinds of natural philosophy John Dee, the subject of her article, pursued at his country home, dissection continued to be performed in private residences even in the nineteenth century; Claude Bernard himself did this. Alix Cooper, in her essay on “Homes and Households” in the Cambridge History of Science volume on early modern science, published a decade after Harkness’s article, claims on the other hand that “homes and households became crucial sites for the pursuit of natural knowledge in early modern Europe.”7 She distinguishes a house, as a place, from a household, which she defines as the people within the house. This is a useful distinction, although it does not entirely encompass the kind of household in which Dee lived, or the urban hôtels of the Paris elite, which physically included much more than a

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house. Cooper points out in addition that in pre-industrial Europe, the homes of artisans were often also their work places, functioning as shops or workshops as well as living quarters. Historians of work and of the family have elucidated the involvement of the household (in Cooper’s sense) – husband and wife, children, servants – in pre-industrial artisanal labor: such trades as printing, weaving, or metalwork. Each member of the household played a role, as did apprentices.8 Cooper sees a similar pattern in the early modern scientific household. Wives, children, and servants are the “unacknowledged and seemingly invisible collaborators” of household science, the home equivalent of Steven Shapin’s “invisible technicians” who worked behind the scenes in early modern scientific societies. The latter included such figures as Robert Hooke and Denis Papin in London and Claude-Antoine Couplet in Paris.9 Household science was a family enterprise, in Cooper’s characterization. As she notes, students often lived with their professors, rather like apprentices, and could provide additional labor to the family enterprise. She describes a family that primarily pursued natural history: collecting plants and minerals and sometimes animals. Cooper argues that women were particularly involved in this activity in their realm of the kitchen, where they compiled books of medicinal and culinary recipes. These recipes and the books that contain them have been much studied recently, as we shall see below. Elaine Leong recently pointed out that both women and men helped to compile such books.10 Other kinds of science took place in the household, too, performed by men in their studies, which doubled as libraries and even museums. John Dee, whose study had two sets of doors to restrict access, epitomizes this figure. But women and children were much less a part of this kind of science, and Cooper does not delve very far into what kinds of science might have been done in such contexts. While Harkness offers further details from the life of John Dee, he did not perform dissections. Cooper’s exploration of household science is closely tied to a model of artisanal culture and to a stereotype of gendered spaces in a household. If dissection was something that was performed in houses, it does not fully conform either to the model of artisanal natural history or to the model of the savant in his study. Although we might put surgeons in the category of artisans, in that surgery as a profession involved training by apprenticeship and had a guild structure, it is difficult to envisage it as a family enterprise to the extent that natural history may have been – for one thing, it was a profession and not an avocation, as was the kind of natural history Cooper describes. Sandra Cavallo describes another kind of household activity in her exploration of “artisans of the body,” which includes surgeons and others such as bathers and hairdressers who attended to the aristocratic body. But dissection is not part of this picture either.11 Although Cooper notes that Vesalius, for one, was known to dissect in his chambers, she does not pinpoint in which room that might have taken place – indeed she seems to assume that it was in his bedroom.12 Vesalius was not alone in hiding purloined corpses in or under his bed – almost two centuries later, the French surgeon Jean Méry also did this – but it seems unlikely that he also dissected them there; where would he have slept? The smells and fluids associated with dissection would have made a bedroom uninhabitable. The scene depicted on the title page of Regnier de Graaf’s 1671 work on the pancreatic juice, showing a suspiciously clean dissection taking place in a bedroom with a patient across the room in a bed, could not represent an actual setting for dissection (see Figure 1). The smells

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Figure 1. Regnier de Graaf, De succo pancreatico, 1671. Wellcome Library, London.

from the cadaver and the heap of dead animals on the floor would hardly be conducive to healing. On the other hand, the crowded disarray of the title page of Gerard Blaes’s Miscellanea anatomica hominis brutorumque variorum from two years later, which includes a bucket under the dissection table, could very well represent a kitchen, with knives on the wall and a window opening out onto a farmyard (Figure 2). Because Cooper and Harkness assume that the kitchen was a female realm, they exclude the possibility that activities not identified as specifically female might have taken place there. Yet, as we shall see below, at least a few women are known to have dissected, most notably Anna Morandi Manzolini and Marie-Marguerite Biheron, both in the eighteenth century. And the

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Figure 2. Gerard Blaes, Miscellanea anatomica hominis brutorumque variorum, 1673. Wellcome Library, London.

preserved specimens that made up the anatomical cabinet – pickled and dried as well as stuffed – constituted a kind of anatomical larder that employed skills well known to women.

Dissection and its sites Dissection, mainly of animals, was arguably the most frequently practiced scientific activity of the seventeenth century: most men of science, from Galileo to Descartes to Newton, dissected at some point in their careers. Those who did not themselves dissect witnessed dissection. It was a customary activity in early scientific societies, both private and public.

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Naturalists, physicians and surgeons – professional groups which overlap – practiced dissection for a number of reasons. Anatomists usually claimed that knowledge of the human body was the primary goal of human and animal dissection, but this knowledge was not merely or exclusively medical. Most dissected the human body to find out what it looked like. Writers of anatomical textbooks asserted that this knowledge gave greater insight into the purposes of God, and reminded spectators of the brevity of life. But mere curiosity also played a role. Human dissection could be, but was not always, employed to determine the cause of death. Autopsies had been performed since the late thirteenth century, and the revival of human dissection in the west in the early fourteenth century after a hiatus of almost a millennium has been linked to forensic needs as well as to embalming. Human dissection also took place in the context of the basic anatomy courses in European medical schools from the fourteenth century through to the eighteenth. Students witnessed a single yearly public dissection of an executed criminal in order to learn the configuration of the parts of the body. Professional organizations such as the London College of Physicians also sponsored such dissections. William Harvey gave the College’s Lumleian Lectures in Anatomy, which included demonstration of two cadavers, in 1616.13 Those who wished to learn more had two alternatives: they could dissect human bodies on their own or they could dissect animals. In most European countries, human bodies were difficult to come by outside of medical faculties or professional bodies, which might be granted a few bodies a year by the municipality. As Pascal Bastien has detailed, in France the corpse of the executed, in the absence of other claims, belonged to the executioner, who could sell it to anatomists. In England, habeas corpus meant that the condemned retained ownership of his (or her) body and could in theory sell it before death. Increased demand across Europe for bodies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, meant that competition for and therefore prices of bodies were high. Surgeons, who held less status than physicians, had particular difficulty in gaining corpses through official means. Grave-robbing was one solution that continued for centuries. Vesalius slyly illustrated a “resurrection party” in the initial letters to his Fabrica. Paris surgeons at times battled the physicians of the Paris Faculty of Medicine for bodies, and a description of London from the 1720s referred satirically to a “Corporation of Corpse-Stealers.”14 As Galen had recognized, animals had several advantages for those who wished to learn more about the structure and function of the human body. Because Christians believed that God created animals for the benefit of humans, there were few moral restrictions to their use and no legal ones. While it was not illegal to steal a human body in early modern Europe, the human corpse held strong emotional and spiritual resonance, so that few wished for their loved ones (or themselves) to be dissected. Grave robbers could be cited for trespassing or sacrilege.15 Animals were readily available: the most common among anatomists were domestic animals such as dogs, cats, lambs, calves, and pigs. Aristotle’s notion of the common identity of the animal body sanctioned the use of animals as stand-ins for humans, although some animals were better for this purpose than others.16 Vesalius was not the first to open a living animal on his dissecting table. Galen had done this many times, to understand the relationship between the structure of the

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body and how it worked. Moreover, unlike other activities of the new science, dissection held no theological opprobrium.17 No works on anatomy, for example, appeared in the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, the first edition of which appeared in 1559. William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, established experimenting on living animals as a standard technique of the new science and the chief method to investigate animal and human function. By the time Bibliotheca anatomica appeared, experimenting on live animals was a standard procedure.18 Dissection was mostly pursued in urban sites, and in a variety of houses and lodgings of relatively modest size as well as in larger households. While wealthy Parisian patrons such as Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, who hosted a well-known scientific academy in the 1650s, lived in large hôtels with multiple rooms, surgeons and physicians such as Louis Gayant and Jean Pecquet who dissected at Montmor’s and other academies did not live in such luxurious settings. Gayant lived on Rue St Jacques among the printers of the Latin Quarter, and in the 1660s and 70s, Pecquet rented rooms on Rue St Martin across the river. Among his rooms were two in the attic that served as a kitchen. Twenty years earlier, Descartes taught himself to dissect in various rented lodgings in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands. The “Oxford Philosophical Club” described by Robert Frank met at the lodgings of various individuals throughout the 1650s and 1660s; the infamous attempted dissection of Anne Greene, who revived at the touch of the anatomist’s knife, took place in the rooms of William Petty, at the house of an apothecary named Clark.19 From 1500 onward, of necessity, anatomists who wished to explore the body beyond the confines of a yearly dissection worked at multiple sites. Before the mid-sixteenth century, universities held annual public dissections outdoors or in a makeshift enclosure, as we know from Vesalius’s famous title page. More permanent anatomy theaters were built in Montpellier in the mid-1550s and at Padua and Leiden in the 1590s, but not until 1620 in Paris and the late 1630s in London and Bologna. In the 1550s, Guillaume Rondelet at Montpellier used its anatomy theater for multiple dissections of humans and animals. But his students, including Felix Platter, and even the master himself also engaged in less public dissection of living and dead animals and of illicitly obtained human corpses. In his diary, Platter reported his participation in several dissections of stolen corpses at the home of a former student.20 As autopsies came to be more frequently performed, hospitals also witnessed an increased number of dissections, although those of the wealthier classes who wished to determine the cause of death had their loved ones dissected at home.21 Even in the age of the academies of the later seventeenth century, dissectors continued to work at multiple sites. Perhaps distaste for dissection pushed it out of the academy and into other places including private homes; or perhaps it was the smell, or the sounds, or the mess. In 1667, shortly after the foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences, experiments in blood transfusion between two dogs began in the Academy’s meeting rooms at the royal library, the Bibliothèque du Roi, but very soon transferred “chez M. Gayant,” that is, to the rooms of the Academy’s anatomist Louis Gayant.22 This was by no means unusual, even for human dissection; at least a few physicians of the Paris faculty took corpses home after paying the proper fee to the executioner. The royal surgeon Pierre

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Dionis recounted how, in order to view the lacteal veins, he ensured that a counterfeiter was fed a hearty meal. Dionis then waited at the site of execution with a coach in which he whisked the body back to his house for dissection. In the early eighteenth century, the Anglican cleric Stephen Hales dissected live cats and dogs in his rooms at Cambridge, and later experimented on live horses at his Twickenham vicarage.23 Animal dissection was widely practiced throughout the seventeenth century, mostly in private homes. Although William Harvey was appointed physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1609, it is unlikely that he performed his numerous dissections of living and dead animals there, including his dissection of his wife’s parrot.24 In 1629, in part inspired by Harvey, René Descartes, who had just moved to Amsterdam, decided to learn to dissect. As he later described his activities that winter to Marin Mersenne: I went nearly every day to the house of a butcher, to see him kill animals, and brought from there to my lodgings the parts that I wished to anatomize more at leisure; which I have done many more times in every place I have lived, and I do not believe any man of intelligence (d’esprit) could blame me.25

Many people were curious about the human and animal body, and like Descartes, they dissected in their residences. Examples abound. Pierre Gassendi and his friend the physician Abraham Du Prat dissected living and dead animals in Du Prat’s Paris rooms in the 1630s and 40s to see the lacteal veins; Jean Pecquet dissected over a hundred living animals between 1647 and 1650 at the Paris home of his patron, Bishop François Fouquet, in the course of his discovery of the thoracic duct. Later in the 1650s, Pecquet continued his experiments at the estate of Fouquet’s brother Nicolas, where he had a designated room for his work. Thomas Willis’s Oxford house from 1657 to 1667, Beam Hall on Merton Street, witnessed many dissections. Many more took place from the 1640s to the 1670s at the independent Parisian academies that met in the homes of Henri de Montmor, Melchisedech Thévenot, Jean-Baptiste Denis, and Pierre Michon Bourdelot.26 In Bologna, Marcello Malpighi became a member of the Coro anatomico (“anatomical choir”) that met in the early 1650s at the house of one of the professors, Bartolommeo Massari.27 Even in more official settings, the boundary between living quarters and dissection room could be thin. The most privileged members of the Paris Academy lived at the Bibliothèque du Roi, which could be a mixed blessing. Christiaan Huygens, whose royal pension included an apartment at the library, reported to his brother a dissection that took place “in the house.”28 Claude Perrault described dissections at the library where the stench must have been unbearable. The lion dissected in late June 1667 “smelled quite bad” after four days, while the bear dissected a year later smelled so bad that everyone held handkerchiefs soaked in eau de vie to their noses.29 It is not surprising, then, that dissection continued to occur at other sites. When the academy anatomist JosephGuichard Duverney was named anatomy professor at the Jardin du Roi in 1682, much of the Academy’s dissecting activity moved with him to the Jardin. Although he had an anatomy theater there, he dissected at least as much in his apartments, as Martin Lister described when he visited him in 1698. Lister also visited Duverney’s fellow academy

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anatomist Jean Méry, who likewise dissected at his home in Rue Princesse near St. Sulpice on the Left Bank.30 Similarly Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, lived at Gresham College, the Society’s headquarters, where he, like Duverney, took on quasiapprentices as assistants. Shapin points out that between 1667 and 1674 the Royal Society, burned out of Gresham College, met at Arundel House, the home of Henry Howard, later Duke of Norfolk. Shapin emphasizes the role of Howard’s grandfather Thomas Howard, 6th earl of Arundel, in establishing a code for gentlemanly behavior in this period, and presents Arundel House as a site of cultivated gentlemanly behavior. However, the Royal Society witnessed many experiments on animals during this period – blood transfusions, injections, and open-thorax experiments, among others – which were perhaps not as gentlemanly as the house seemed to require. Some of this activity very likely also took place at Hooke’s lodgings at this time which, according to Shapin, was not considered a gentlemanly place.31 As these examples show, it is difficult in this period clearly to distinguish “public” from “private.” These terms did not have quite the same meaning in the seventeenth century as they do now. John Dee’s library had two sets of doors to keep prying eyes away from his conversations with angels. Even if most men of science did not have such conversations, they often had a room or “cabinet” in which they could keep books, collections, and instruments. But how private were such rooms, and private houses generally? The academies of Montmor, Bourdelot and others offer one example: they took place in private homes but were anything but private, following an aristocratic model of private homes with public rooms. Although Robert Boyle has been presented as the model of the solitary experimenter, Steven Shapin acknowledges that Boyle’s place in society obliged him to entertain guests. And early modern people of any rank were seldom truly alone; it was more a matter of who was in the house than the presence or absence of people. Montaigne’s solitude in his tower was viewed as highly unusual and even a little suspect. Simon Chaplin has described in detail John Hunter’s house in eighteenth-century London, with the salon run by his wife at the front of the house and dead bodies coming in at the back door.32 Moreover, Shapin and many others have argued for the importance of witnessing in the confirmation of matters of fact. Witnesses were particularly critical in dissection, where the visual evidence could be difficult to discern or interpret. Therefore even sites of less exalted social station than Montmor’s hôtel in the Marais were of necessity not private. When Gayant transfused dogs at home, he did not do it alone, for several witnesses are recorded. Additionally, Pecquet noted several participants (and he noted them as participants rather than merely witnesses) to his work at Bishop Fouquet’s. The French physician Gui Patin recounted in the 1650s that a physician from the Paris faculty had been granted a body for surgical practice. The physician took the body home to dissect, and found some interesting anomalies. “Toute le monde,” even the famous Paris anatomist Jean Riolan, stopped by the physician’s house to see these phenomena. Duverney’s apartments at the Jardin du Roi were freely available to Martin Lister and his companion, although the sight of the litter of body parts sent the companion “down the Stairs much faster than he came up.”33

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The early modern kitchen With the rise of the history of food as a subdiscipline, historians have begun to investigate the kitchen, but its status as a potential site of many kinds of science has so far not been deeply considered. Part of this lack of attention has to do with the modern designation of the kitchen as a female space; therefore only “female” activities such as cooking and other domestic tasks are considered to have taken place there. Beginning with the work of Londa Schiebinger in the late 1980s, feminist historians have valorized women’s work in early modern science, including what Schiebinger identified as “medicinal cooking.”34 As several historians have shown, women took major roles in family medical care, and personal recipe collections include a number of medicinal recipes.35 But is this all that happened in the kitchen? The term “kitchen” or “cuisine” or “cucina” or “Küche” was not the only word used to designate the room we now think of as a kitchen. “Firehouse, bodystead, hearthroom, houseplace” are some English terms from the seventeenth century, evoking a room with more uses than simply cooking. In his Maison rustique (written in the 1550s), the anatomist and writer Charles Estienne wrote (in a contemporary translation), “The first foundation of a good house must be the kitchin.”36 A century and a half later, the surgeon Pierre Dionis compared the human body to the architecture of a house: the kitchen corresponded to the bas-ventre, the lower abdomen or groin; the center of the body.37 But the kitchen may more usefully be seen as a complex of rooms rather than just a single room. In aristocratic households, this complex could be quite large, with a number of larders or storage spaces for different kinds of foods: a “dry larder” for bread and cooked meats; various “wet larders” for raw meats, fish, and vegetables; a dairy; and rooms for salting and smoking. The largest houses had separate bakehouses and breweries. The kitchens at the royal palace at Hampton Court outside London comprised some sixty rooms. But even a more modest house had a separate (and unheated) scullery for washing dishes, cleaning and preparing vegetables, and preparing fish and meat, as well as a separate dry pantry for storage.38 As we shall see, the scullery is the most likely site for dissection. At the center of the kitchen complex was what most think of as the kitchen, the one room in a house with a constant fire: one that was not allowed to go out. As Sara Pennell has pointed out, this made the kitchen the center of the house, a meeting place, particularly in winter, for a house’s inhabitants. Far from being behind the scenes, it was a populated, dynamic, and even contested space.39 As spaces in a house became further differentiated in the eighteenth century, the central kitchen began to lose this “heterotopic” character to become a place solely for cooking food. Michel Foucault defined a “heterotopia” as a place where two or more forms of knowledge and/or social practice existed side by side. These could include incongruous and even conflicting activities and objects.40 But we should not read backwards from the eighteenth-century kitchen into the seventeenth. Moreover, cooking was far from a straightforward activity aimed purely at human nourishment. Claude Mignot has examined the architecture of the kitchen in middle class and particularly aristocratic houses in seventeenth-century Paris. Although, as in the much more modest houses Pennell examined, cooking and its ancillary activities had sometimes

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been confined to a basement in the sixteenth century, these activities moved upstairs by the seventeenth. Apart from the constant fire, the other requirements of a kitchen were the provision of light, and particularly fresh air, in the central cooking area and also in larders and the scullery. These also militated against the kitchen being under the house and brought it up to street level. The smells, noise, and heat of the central kitchen – not to mention the ever-present danger of fire – were increasingly relegated to a room at the corner of the house (the Hôtel Carnavalet in Paris even had a separate little building).41 The scullery needed a source of water and drainage; often it had drains in the floor. The kitchen complex had its own entrance to the outside, either to the street or to a courtyard or back yard (in modest homes this might be the entrance to the house), to facilitate bringing in the numerous requirements of food and fuel. Estienne described in detail the ideal placement of the kitchen in a farmhouse: on one side of the house, up a small flight of stairs from the entrance.42 Oddly to us, the kitchen was not at all close to the dining room in aristocratic hôtels, and servants had to run across the courtyard with covered dishes. But eating lukewarm food was apparently less annoying than unwanted and awkward congruity to a kitchen: Mignot comments, “on se résigne à manger tiède, plutôt que d’être incommodés d’une promiscuité gênante.”43 A merchants’ house known as the Crane and built around 1540 in the London neighborhood of Cheapside had a stone-paved kitchen at the back of the house on the first floor, above the shop on the ground floor.44 Kitchens and particularly sculleries were often paved in stone to facilitate cleaning. Paintings of the period show both kitchen and scullery scenes (Figure 3). The kind of “medicinal cooking” that Schiebinger and others have described was largely plant-based, and fits Cooper’s image of artisanal natural history. But a few medicinal recipes, as we shall see, involved not only animal parts but animal slaughter. Moreover, even in artisanal households, meat was a significant part of the diet, and killing and butchering animals was part of the culinary as well as the medicinal activity of the kitchen. The first printed illustration of a kitchen, from Giovanni Rosselli’s 1517 cookbook Epulario, depicts a man and a woman handling a dead rabbit, and another man at a table cutting up a bird of some kind.45 It is not a coincidence that “meat” (“viande”) was a synonym for “food” in both English and French. The very poorest ate meat only occasionally. But the kinds of people who might have dissected in their houses were not among the very poor. In terms of equipment, the kitchen certainly possessed many of the items required for dissection, including surfaces for cutting, receptacles for organs and blood, and large kettles for boiling bones. Materials for cleaning up after such work were also at hand, including, in sculleries, water and drains. Moreover, its separate entrance allowed easy entrance and exit of bodies, parts, and observers. The kitchen was a place well accustomed to the presence of blood and the dismemberment of animals, and well-equipped with knives.

The anatomist in the kitchen Anatomy in the “ghastly kitchen,” whether it was a real or metaphorical place, encompassed several activities. The act of dissection was analogous (or even, critics claimed,

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Figure 3. Kitchen interior with a young maid hanging meats, circle of Jean-Baptiste de Saive, 1563. Wikimedia Commons.

identical) to butchery or carving. Making anatomical preparations employed many techniques familiar to cooks. And all who used the kitchen employed its sensory apparatus: sight, touch, taste, and smell, and at times also hearing. As we have seen, Descartes recounted to Mersenne how he learned to dissect by witnessing animal slaughter and butchery at a local butcher’s shop in Amsterdam. Mersenne commented that Descartes liked to visit villages at the time of the pig slaughter, usually in the fall. Descartes retorted defensively, “It’s no crime to be curious about anatomy.” Besides, he added, just as many pigs were slaughtered in the city. He had no need to go to the country.46 A contemporary painting of a slaughtered pig in the process of being butchered (Figure 4)certainly resembles a dissection scene, and the bubble-blowing boy (here blowing into the animal’s bladder) recalls the moralizing purpose of human dissection: “homo bulla est,” man is but a bubble. One way to learn about kitchen practices in the past, including meat and butchery as well as cooking, is through printed and manuscript cookery books. These became much more common in the seventeenth century. Cookbooks have been largely overlooked by historians of science, with the notable exception of Rachel Laudan’s work on diet and chemistry.47 Historians of medicine have mainly used books of household recipes, both printed and in manuscript. The Wellcome Library has a large collection of early modern manuscript recipe books and has digitized many of them.48 They are a wonderful resource for the history of the early modern household and the history of medicine, and they give some clues to what went on in seventeenth-century kitchens. At least two other categories of cookery books appeared across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: those written by male chefs in aristocratic households, and household advice/cookery books written for (and often by) bourgeois women who wanted advice in running a household; there is some overlap in content between the latter

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Figure 4. Jan Victors, Butchering a Pig, 1648. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

and manuscript recipe books. Both of these have advantages and drawbacks as historical sources. Like conduct books, which have been extensively (and at times uncritically) used by historians of early modern Europe as evidence of how people behaved, household advice books were prescriptive rather than descriptive: they advised how one should behave. They do not necessarily tell us how people actually did behave; manuscript recipe books probably come closer to describing actual behavior, and looking at these two kinds of sources together can reveal much about what went on in certain kitchens. All of these sources confirm that, with the exception of that of the very poor, the early modern diet contained quite a lot of meat. Essential to the good householder was knowledge of meat animals and of the butchery, carving, and preparation of meat.49 Aristocratic chefs intended that their books described how people actually behaved. Their audiences included those who read them as People magazine is read today, to gain a taste of how the upper classes lived. The sixteenth-century chef and author Bartolommeo Scappi, for example, detailed his service to popes and cardinals, concluding with an account of the meals served at the cardinals’ lengthy 1549 conclave to select the pope.50 It is possible, therefore, that the authors of such books exaggerated the size, variety, and extent of the menus described for greater effect, although other sources affirm that there were aristocratic meals as lavish as some of the ones described.51 The practice of service à la française – putting all of the dishes on the table at the same time, rather than serving in courses – highlighted the abundance of the menus. However, as in the example of conduct books, these cookbooks describe the habits of a very small section of society, so it is not clear how much we might legitimately generalize from them to make broader statements about consumption. Most readers of these books probably did not have charge of an aristocratic kitchen.

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Pierre de La Varenne, cook to the Marquis d’Uxelles, wrote the highly popular 1651 Le cuisinier françois, which was reprinted many times in French and almost immediately translated into English. Pirated editions appeared in the Netherlands. He opened his book with a lengthy list of meats proper to the season. Much of the book consisted of ways to prepare meat; even the “entremets” between the meat courses included items such as pig’s feet, ham, chicken, and organ meats.52 Robert May, a cook to the English nobility, including the Countess of Kent, began his 1660 cookbook The Accomplish’d Cook with a list of terms referring to methods of carving different animals. Tearms of Carving Break that dear, leach that brawn, rear that goose, lift that swan, sauce that capon, spoil that hen, frust that chicken, unbrace that mallard, unlace that coney, dismember that hern [sic], display that crane, disfigure that peacock, unjoynt that bitturn, untach that curlew, allay that pheasant, wing that partridge, wing that quail, mince that plover, thigh that pidgeon, border that pasty, thigh that woodcock, thigh all manner of small birds. Timber the fire, tire that egg, chine that salmon, string that lamprey, splat that pike, sauce that plaice, sauce that tench, splay that bream, side that haddock, tusk that barbell, culpon that trout, fin that chevin, transom that eel, tranch that sturgeon, undertranch that porpus, tame that crab, barb that lobster.53

This list is copied from the 1508 Boke of Keruynge, among the earliest printed books on “all the feestes in the yere for the seruyce of a prynce or any other estate.”54 As we see from this list, the diet of the English nobility included a wide array of animals, which changed little before 1700. By a century later, swans, peacocks, bitterns, herons, and curlews had disappeared from the menu, but in this period one was as likely to turn up on your table as in your natural history text. Even the “modern” cook La Varenne, who eschewed many medieval ingredients and modes of preparation, included herons on his menus.55 May went on to detail exactly how to carve various fowl and small mammals, with considerable anatomical detail – much more, in many cases, than the 1508 author had provided. For example, to “unlace that Coney” (rabbit), May advised how best to remove the kidneys with the least damage to other flesh; his instructions would require a very sharp knife and considerable manual dexterity.56 William Rabisha’s suggestively titled The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, published shortly after May, aimed at a slightly less exalted audience; it is somewhere between an aristocratic cookbook and a household manual, with a large number of recipes for preserves, jams and jellies. Rabisha also plagiarized the terms for carving from the 1508 Boke of Keruyng, placing them at the end of his book rather than at the beginning. He also plagiarized carving instructions both from that work and from May. Books of domestic management aimed at women are no less explicit. The name of Hannah Woolley, who died around 1670, was attached to a large number of books of household management with various titles but very similar content. To give one example, the many editions of Woolley’s Accomplish’d Ladys Delight from 1670 onward also included carving terms. If the list of animals is not quite as extensive as May’s, it included teals, cranes, herons, swans, and other wild birds, and was probably copied from the

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same 1508 source, rearranged in alphabetical order.57 Woolley’s directions for carving, like Rabisha’s, were largely plagiarized from the Boke of Keruyng and from May’s work, and like them, they assume a certain amount of anatomical knowledge: To Unbrace a Mallard Raise up the Pinion and Legs, but take them not off, and raise the merry-thought [breast bone] from the Breast, and lace down each side with your Knife, waving it to and fro.58

Carving was indeed an art, as Vincenzo Cervio claimed in Il trinciante (“the carver” or “the carving knife”), first published in 1581 and often reprinted. Cervio was the carver for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and he gave virtuoso performances at the Cardinal’s banquets, carving in mid-air a fowl balanced on a fork. His book detailed the differences between various fowl (together with an engraving picturing the anatomy of a “gallo d’india” and a peacock) as well as between many other animals. Unlike May’s account of carving a rabbit, which occupied a single paragraph, Cervio’s instructions on how to carve a fowl took a page and a half and included far more detail.59 Matthia Giegher’s book of the same title, first published in 1621, contained even more detailed instructions, with over thirty engravings illustrating the proper knife cuts.60 Cervio illustrated a single knife “to saw a bone” along with forks at the beginning of his book, and several more knives at the end. Later editions of Cervio’s Il trinciante were sometimes appended to Scappi’s cookbook, which itself included an additional plate illustrating knives (see Figure 5). Giegher included two plates illustrating knives and carving tools. These illustrations can be compared to Vesalius’s illustration of dissection tools in De fabrica (Figure 6), and its numerous homages on title pages of anatomical textbooks. Housewives were also called upon to butcher and sometimes slaughter animals, particularly fowl. In aristocratic households, servants would perform this activity in the scullery, where the blood and entrails could be contained and easily cleaned up. Hannah Woolley and her avatars matter-of-factly described butchery as a domestic chore; her recipe for baking a pig in clay instructs, “stick your Pig, and Blood him well, and when he is warm, put him in your prepared Coffin of Clay, thick everywhere, with his Hair, Skin, and all (his Entrails drawn, and Belly sewn up again) then throw him into the Oven.”61 In addition, the preparation of medicines often involved various kinds of animal slaughter, and this was recorded in manuscript recipe books as well as printed ones. Literary historian Wendy Wall comments about Woolley, “Part and parcel of physic was the transformation of the kitchen into a slaughterhouse strewn liberally with blood and carcasses.”62 Woolley’s recipe in The Queenlike Closet for “The Cock water most delicate and precious for restoring out of deep Consumptions” begins: Take a Red Cock, pluck him alive, then slit him down the back, and take out his Intrals, cut him in quarters, and bruise him in a Morter, with his Head, Legs, Heart, Liver and Gizard. 63

The 1653 Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery, attributed to the Countess of Kent (sometime employer of the chef Robert May), included a similar recipe for consumption that involved plucking a cock alive and then butchering

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Figure 5. Carving tools. Bartolommeo Scappi, Opera, 1574. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

it. In addition, the Countess included two recipes for the relief of “stiff sinews” that required crushing nestling swallows in a mortar, and two more that required a live fox. The recipe for “Oyle of Foxes, or Badgers, for Ach in the Joynts” instructed: Take a live Fox, or Badger, of a middle age, of a full body, well fed, and fat, kill him, bowell him and skin him … break his bones small that you may have all the marrow, this done, set him a boyling in salt Brine … when he is so sodden as that his bones and flesh do part in sunder, strain all through a strainer.”64

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Figure 6. Dissecting tools. Vesalius, De fabrica, 1543. Wellcome Library, London.

The boundary between culinary or medicinal uses of animals and their uses by naturalists was quite slippery and at times indistinct. In the mid-sixteenth century, the natural history text of Adam Lonicer or Lonizter opened its section on animals with a discussion of meat and a sketch of cuts of meat. His account of the chicken noted its medicinal qualities.65 The Historiae animalium of Conrad Gessner, one of the most important works on natural history of the Renaissance, included instructions on cooking certain animals. Gessner had recently written a preface to a new edition of the works of the ancient Roman chef Apicius, and took his recipes from there. The Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi also included recipes with his account of chickens.66 Nonetheless, to be called a “butcher” was a term of abuse to anatomists. Anatomical illustrations largely focused on the “lighted hall” rather than the ghastly kitchen that preceded them. This was true of both human and animal anatomy. The illustrations for the Paris Academy’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–76) showed dissected organs as neat and bloodless parts arranged carefully on the page above an image of the animal in life (see Figure 7). In 1653, the “prince of anatomists” Jean Riolan, objecting to the younger generation’s embrace of Harvey’s techniques of vivisection, criticized the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin’s use of the word “culter” or knife in his anatomy textbook. Riolan called it “a butchers’ instrument, not an anatomist’s.” “This anatomy of living animals,” Riolan went on, “is like a butcher’s shop …. Therefore I hate very much this inquisitive anatomy, and these probers and cutters.” Shortly after Riolan published these words, Bartholin’s assistant Michael Lyser published his popular dissection manual Culter anatomicus (The anatomical knife).67 The connection between anatomy and butchery nonetheless seemed unavoidable, even if it was merely metaphorical. Descartes relied on a butcher for anatomical instruction, and in Discours de la Méthode he famously recommended “anyone unversed in anatomy to take the trouble … to have the heart of some large animal with

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Figure 7. Castor. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux, 1671. Wellcome Library, London.

lungs dissected before him” prior to reading his account of the circulation of the blood. 68 The mid-seventeenth century Dutch painting of a slaughtered cow, apparently hanging in a kitchen (see Figure 8), recalls Descartes’s statement, and the pins in the carcass, as well as another bubble-blowing boy, recall human dissection. Among the bills for Joseph-Guichard Duverney’s anatomy course at the Jardin du Roi in the 1680s, we find charges for “plusieurs parties … d’animaux de la bouchier de Faubourg

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Figure 8. Abraham van den Hecken, The Slaughtered Cow, c. 1635–55. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

St Victor.”69 Keith Thomas has cast doubt on the widespread belief that butchers were ineligible to sit on British juries in capital cases because their sensibilities were blunted by the experience of slaughter. But butchers were nonetheless widely regarded with distaste. Thomas quotes the poet and playwright John Gay, who urged his fellow Londoners in 1717 To shun the surly butcher’s greasy tray, Butchers, whose hands are dy’d with blood’s foul stain, And always foremost in the hangman’s train.

Popular opinion viewed butchers and executioners as morally equivalent and scorned their dealings with death and blood.70 In distancing themselves from mere butchery, Riolan and other anatomists also endeavored to distance themselves from the act of dissection (as opposed to its result), wherever it took place. Female anatomists seemed

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particularly careful in this regard: the eighteenth-century anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini depicted herself dissecting a (bloodless) brain while dressed in fine clothes and jewels. Unfortunately we have no images of the other major female anatomist of the era, Marie-Marguerite Biheron, who like Manzolini, also made anatomical wax models.71 As noted above, several of the domestic animals that most commonly served as experimental subjects were also food animals, such as lambs, pigs, and calves. Because of their anatomical similarities to humans, Galen had often dissected pigs and they continued to be frequently used; Vesalius’s image of a pig tied to a table for dissection was soon repeated on the title page of the 1550 edition of Galen’s works. While dogs were most commonly the subjects in animal-to-animal blood transfusion, lambs and calves also functioned both in animal-to-animal transfusion and as donors in human transfusion experiments. Harvey used the hearts of grown cattle, as did Descartes, to demonstrate coronary structure and function, and he used a wide variety of animals, including fish and particularly eels, to show the motion of the heart. This inspired Isaac Newton to cut up the heart of an eel in the kitchen of Trinity College to observe its continued beating.72 Many domestic animals used in experiments, including dogs, cats, and mice, did not serve as food. But these animals were household animals, and they commonly frequented the kitchen. Blaes’s 1673 title page (Figure 2) depicted a number of domesticated and food animals, as well as a fox and a monkey. Foxes were frequent dissection subjects, and also no strangers to kitchen physic. Monkeys served as performing animals and pets. As an urban activity, dissection utilized these urban and near-urban animals.73 Gessner and Aldrovandi had demonstrated the role of cooking in natural history, and this role extended to the anatomical enterprise. Cooking or boiling animal and human parts served a number of purposes. Cooking helped to solidify and fix certain parts such as muscles to make them easier to observe, particularly under the microscope. Sometimes cooking made certain features more obvious: the Italian physician Lorenzo Bellini boiled animal kidneys in order to demonstrate that their structure was fibrous rather than muscular.74 Cooking could also be a method of preservation. Human and animal skeletons were common accoutrements to anatomical theaters and natural history collections, and boiling remained the most common method to clean bones.75 Other methods of food preservation such as drying and preservation in alcohol were also employed to preserve anatomical parts. Rabisha included a number of recipes for preserving fruits in wine or vinegar, and meats could be preserved by drying or salting.76 In De fabrica, Vesalius described the process of making skeletons that would be followed for the next two centuries and more. The process began first with dissection and then with boiling “in a large and capacious cauldron … of the kind women use for the preparation of lye over the fire.” The bones were boiled, carefully covered by water at all times, for several hours, with regular skimming off of froth and fat. “The object of the cooking is to clean the bones as thoroughly as is done with the knife while eating,” he wrote. Therefore one should pull out individual bones from the “broth” with tongs from time to time and clean them further with the hands or a knife. The cleaned bones were then placed in more boiling water, removed and carefully dried with a rough cloth to remove remaining bits.77 Subsequent instructions retained references to food and eating: Michael Lyser in the 1650s noted that young bodies needed less boiling than older ones;

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“This even the common Cooks are apprised of, because they daily find that old Meat takes a longer Time in boiling than young.”78 The smell of a boiling human body, along with the other smells of blood and decomposition, made the “ghastly kitchen” truly ghastly, even for those accustomed to the myriad smells of the early modern city. Smells of decomposition were considered especially noxious.79 The dissection at the Paris Academy described by Claude Perrault employed copious amounts of eau de vie to mask the smells. Nonetheless, smelling body substances, including excrement, sweat, breath, and skin, also continued to be important in diagnosis. In many cases, smelling went along with tasting; Harvey usually coupled the two senses in his work on generation. To those more interested in the chemical qualities of acidity or alkalinity, such as Regnier de Graaf, smell was less important than taste. Even after the invention of chemical assays, tasting continued to be an alarmingly common way to test substances, particularly those derived from living sources.80 Taste, like dissection itself, was a means of gaining sensory access to the hidden processes of the body. In De generatione, Harvey frequently tasted chicken eggs over the course of their development, as well as the stomach contents of chicks and other animals, amniotic fluid, the milk of various animals, and blood. For example, Fabricius referred to the amniotic fluid as the “sweat” of the foetus, declaring it to be “sharp and saltish.” Harvey found this to be absurd: what need would a foetus have to sweat, particularly a non-human foetus with fur or feathers? Who indeed had ever seen a chicken sweat? Tasting the fluid, Harvey found it instead to be of “a good savour, and like a kind of watry Milk,” disproving Fabricius’s claim.81 Jean Pecquet tasted the fluid in what he called the “receptaculum” or cisterna to determine if it was really digested food or some other substance, a critical question as he sought the outlet for the lacteal veins. De Graaf repeatedly tasted the pancreatic fluid of dogs as he struggled to determine its nature and function, comparing it to gastric fluids and vomit, which he also tasted. Thomas Willis tasted the urine of people with what we now call diabetes, noting its sweet, almost honey-like taste, and coined the term “diabetes mellitus” (mellitus meaning “honey-tasting”) for the disease.82 Bellini also tasted urine, and Malpighi compared the tastes of bile and earwax.83 This “fetid and throbbing ground of life” indeed required a ghastly kitchen on its way to the lighted hall of science.

The kitchen as heterotopia Like cooking, dissection was messy, noisy, smelly, and bloody, employing dangerous instruments that should only be wielded by skilled operators. The ghastly kitchen was a fundamentally unsettling place: the use of animals simultaneously for domestic and scientific purposes corresponds to Michel Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia, a place not only of incongruous objects but of heteroclite ones “laid, placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to find a common locus beneath them all.” In such a state, says Foucault, language is secretly undermined, common names “shatter and tangle.”84 Are chickens – and human bodies – to be carved or dissected? Are the blades employed in butchery, carving, and dissection to be called knives or another term?

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In the kitchen, cooks, surgeons, physicians, and natural philosophers – as well as the consumers of food and natural philosophy – met and performed tasks that might be viewed as analogous, but for utterly different ends. They employed many similar tools, and their actions merged and diverged. They used all of their senses to cut, carve, cook, taste, and smell, and exchanged techniques as well as instruments. It is clear that early modern science moved easily in and out of the academy, and that the “ghastly kitchen” constituted one of its birthplaces. Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the History of Science Society and at the Manchester International Congress of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ICHSTM), 2013; a summary of the latter appeared on the ICHSTM 2013 blog and on my own blog, anitaguerrini.com/anatomia-animalia; a slightly different version entitled “Ghastly Kitchens” appeared on the British Library’s Untold Lives blog. A longer version was presented to the seminar “Les frontières mouvantes entre sciences et savoirs,” Écoles des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, December 2013 and as a Rare Books Initiative Lecture, University of Oregon, January 2014; thanks to Kapil Raj and Vera Keller, respectively, for inviting me to speak. I am grateful to Rachel Laudan, Elaine Leong, the editor of History of Science, and two anonymous referees for their comments, and to Deborah Krohn and Tricia Close-Koenig for references.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities, Oregon State University.

Notes 1. On natural history in the household, see especially Mary Terrall, Nature Caught in the Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). She mentions insect dissection on pp. 34–37. 2. Daniel LeClerc and Jean-Jacques Manget (eds.), Bibliotheca anatomica (Geneva: J.-A. Chouët, 1685), Preface. 3. For example, Domenico Bertoloni Meli and Anita Guerrini (eds.), special section on vivisection, Journal of the History of Biology, 46(3), 2013, pp. 167–313; Anita Guerrini, The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). I do not wish to assert that pathology was entirely ignored; see Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Cynthia Klestinec, “Practical Experience in Anatomy,” in Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal (eds.) The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 33–57. 4. Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis, 79,1988, pp. 373–404. See p. 378. 5. On the definition of household, see Vanessa Harding, “Families and Housing in SeventeenthCentury London,” Parergon, 24, 2007, pp. 115–138.

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6. Deborah Harkness, “Managing an Experimental Household: the Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy,” Isis, 88, 1997, pp. 247–262, at p. 249. 7. Alix Cooper, “Homes and Households,” in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.) Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 224–237. 8. Ibid.; see, for example, Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 9. Cooper, “Homes and Households,” p. 225; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 355–407; Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist, 77, 1989, pp. 554–563. On Couplet, see Guerrini, Courtiers’ Anatomists, p. 117. 10. Cooper, “Homes and Households,” pp. 229–231; Elaine Leong, “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household,” Centaurus, 55, 2013, pp. 81–103. 11. Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 12. Cooper, “Homes and Households, p. 226, citing C.D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 64, 112. 13. There is an extensive literature on the origins of human dissection. For an introduction, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 78–114; Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006); Cynthia Klestinec, Theatres of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). On Harvey’s lectures see Gweneth Whitteridge (ed.), The Anatomical Lectures of William Harvey (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 1964). 14. Pascal Bastien, Une histoire de la peine de mort (Paris: Seuil, 2011), pp. 136–38; Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 65–117; Marcel Fosseyeux, “Le prix des cadavres à Paris, aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Aesculape, 3, 1913, pp. 52–56; A View of London and Westminster, or the Town Spy (London: T Warner, 1728) , pp. 14, 50. 15. Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body, trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Raphael Mandressi, Le regard de l’anatomiste (Paris: Seuil, 2003), pp. 52–60. 16. Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 21–22, 173–184. 17. Carlino, Books of the Body, pp. 224–225, concludes that “The opposition to dissection was not … religious in character …. But was rather an anthropological [problem.]” 18. Although we would term this activity “vivisection” – meaning surgical intervention on a live animal – this term is anachronistic for the seventeenth century, and I will use it sparingly. “Dissection” in this context refers to both living and dead subjects. 19. On Gayant and Pecquet, see Guerrini, Courtiers’ Anatomists; on Petty, see Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 50; on Anne Greene, Mercurius Politicus, Issue 28, 12 December 1650. On Descartes, see below and Jenny Boulboullé, “In touch with life: investigating epistemic practices in the life sciences from a hands-on perspective” (Ph.D. thesis, Maastricht University, 2012). 20. Felix Platter, Beloved Son Felix: The Journal of Felix Platter, a medical student in Montpellier in the Sixteenth Century, Séan Jennett (ed. and trans.) (London: Frederick Muller, 1961), pp. 88–90, 92–93, 110. 21. David Harley, “Political Post-Mortems and Morbid Anatomy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Social History of Medicine, 7, 1994, pp. 1–28.

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22. Guerrini, Courtiers’ Anatomists, pp. 102–103. 23. Fosseyeux, “Prix des cadavres”; Pierre Dionis, L’anatomie de l’homme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Laurent d’Houry, 1694), p. 184; Stephen Hales, Statical Essays: Containing Haemastaticks, Vol. 2. (London: Innys and Manby, 1733–40) . 24. Neither Harvey’s biographer Geoffrey Keynes nor Gweneth Whitteridge, who translated his anatomy lectures, say anything about where he dissected animals. 25. Descartes to Mersenne, 13 November 1639, Cornelis de Waard et al. (eds.), Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne,, Vol. 8. (Paris: 1933–1988), p. 610 (my translation). 26. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 179ff; Guerrini, Courtiers’ Anatomists. 27. Howard Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, Vol. 1 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 126–7. 28. Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, 4 February 1667, Christiaan Huygens, Œuvres complètes [my translation of “ceans”], Vol. 6. (The Hague: 1888–1950), pp. 104. 29. Claude Perrault, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1671), p. 5; Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 29, 293 n. 29, citing the notebooks of the chemist Claude Bourdelin, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS n.a.r. 5147, fol. 21v. 30. Martin Lister, Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, R.P. Stearns (ed.) (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 65–69. 31. Shapin, “House of Experiment,” p. 381; see also Anita Guerrini, “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 50, 1989, pp. 391–407. 32. On early modern privacy, see Nicole Castan, “The Public and the Private,” in Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (eds.), A History of Private Life, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–91), pp. 403–45; on private and public spaces in the house, see David Austin, “Private and Public: an Archaeological Consideration of Things,” in H. Hundsichler, G. Jaritz and T. Kuhtreiber (eds.), Der Vielfalt der Dinge: Neue Wege zur Analyse Mittelalterlich Sachkultur (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998), pp. 163–206; Steven Shapin, “The Mind is its Own Place: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context, 4, 1991, pp. 191–218; Simon Chaplin, “John Hunter and the ‘musaeum oeconomy’,” (Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London, 2009), p. 187. 33. Gayant’s witnesses appear in Paris Academy of Sciences, Registres, Vol. 1 (1667–68) and Dossier, Claude Perrault: both in Archives, Paris Academy of Sciences, Institut de France, Paris. Jean Pecquet, Experimenta nova anatomica (Paris: 1651), p. 19; Fosseyeux, “Prix des cadavres,” p. 53; Lister, Journey to Paris, p. 65. 34. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 112–116. 35. Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Sara Pennell, “Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England,” in V. Burke and J. Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–258; Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, “Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern Medical Marketplace,” in M.S. Jenner and P. Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies c. 1450 to c. 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 133–152; Leong, “Collecting Knowledge.” 36. Sara Pennell, “ ‘Pots and Pans History’: the Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,” Journal of Design History, 11, 1998, pp. 201–216, at p. 202; Charles Estienne, Maison rustique or The Countrie Farme, trans. by Richard Surflet (London: Edm. Bollifant for Bonham Norton, 1600) , p. 4. Rachel Laudan enumerates the kinds of work that go on in a kitchen in Cuisine and Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 11.

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37. Dionis, L’anatomie, p. 153. 38. Pamela Sambrook and Peter Brears (eds.), The Country House Kitchen 1650–1900 (London: The History Press, 1996), pp. 11–22; Peter Brears, All the King’s Cooks: The Tudor Kitchens of King Henry VIII and Hampton Court Palace, 2nd ed. (London: Souvenir Press, 2011); Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2008), pp. 173–201; Anne Willan, The Cookbook Library (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 58–59. 39. Pennell, “Pots and Pans History.” 40. On the concept of the “heterotopia,” see Michael Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994), Preface, pp. xvii–xviii; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5, 1984, pp. 46–49. 41. Claude Mignot, “De la cuisine à la salle à manger, ou de quelques détours de l’art de la distribution,” Dix-septième siècle, 41, 1989, pp. 17–35. 42. Estienne, Maison rustique, pp. 22–23. 43. Mignot, “De la cuisine à la salle à manger,” p. 33: “One resigns oneself to eat lukewarm [food], rather than being bothered by an awkward lack of privacy.” 44. Harding, “Families and Housing,” pp. 121–123. 45. Deborah Krohn, “Picturing the Kitchen: Renaissance Treatise and Period Room,” Studies in the Decorative Arts, 16, 2008–9, pp. 20-34, at pp. 22–24; Giovanni Rosselli, Opera noua chiamata Epulario quale tracta il modo de cucinare ogni carne, vcelli, pesci, de ogni sorte. (Venice: Bernardino Benalio, 1517). 46. Descartes to Mersenne, 13 November 1639, Mersenne, Correspondence, Vol. 8: p. 610. On pre-modern butchery, see Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, “Medieval and Early Modern Butchery: Evidence from the Monastery of La Charité-sur-Loire (Nièvre),” Food and Foodways, 2, 1987, pp. 31–48. 47. Rachel Laudan, “A Kind of Chemistry,” Petits Propos Culinaires, 62, 1999, pp. 8–22; Anita Guerrini, “The New Culinary History,” Early Science and Medicine, 4, 1999, pp. 164–65. 48. http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/about-the-collections/archives-and-manuscripts/ digitised-recipe-books-project/ 49. For an example, see Vincenzo Tanara, L’economia del cittadino in villa, 2nd ed., Book 3 (Venice: Bertani, 1658). 50. Bartolommeo Scappi, Opera (Venice, 1570), untitled, unnumbered 8 pages at the end. On Scappi, see Deborah Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolommeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchen. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, in press). 51. See Ken Albala, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 52. Pierre de la Varenne, Le cuisinier françois (Paris: Pierre David, 1651), front matter, not paginated. 53. Robert May, The Accomplish’d Cook (London: R.W. for Nath. Brooke, 1660), sig. B2r. 54. Anonymous, The Boke of Keruynge (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1508), not paginated. See also Willan, Cookbook Library, p. 84. 55. La Varenne, Le cuisinier françois, pp. 66, 76. Jean-Louis Flandrin claims that such birds had disappeared from the European menu by 1650: “Dietary Choices and Culinary Technique, 1500–1800,” in Food: A Culinary History, Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (eds.), trans. by Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp. 403–417, at pp. 404–405; on La Varenne’s status as a “modern” cook, see Laudan, “A Kind of Chemistry”; T. Sarah Peterson, Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 56. May, Accomplish’d Cook, sig. B3v. 57. Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d Ladys Delight (London: B. Harris, 1670), pp. 369–370. 58. Ibid., p. 374.

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59. Vincenzo Cervio, Il trinciante (Rome: Gabbia, 1593), pp. 49–50. 60. Mattia Giegher, Li tre trattati (Padua: Paolo Frambotto, 1639) ; see also Willan, Cookbook Library, pp. 84–85. 61. Woolley. Accomplish’d Ladys Delight, p. 267. 62. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3–4. 63. Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet; or, Rich Cabinet: Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts (London: R. Lowndes, 1670), p. 12. 64. A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery; Collected, and Practised by the Right Honorable, the Countesse of Kent, late deceased. Published by W.I. Gent. (London: G.D. for William Shears, 1653), pp. 100–101. 65. Adam Lonitzer, Naturalis historiae opus novum (Frankfurt am Main: Chr. Egenolph, 1551), pp. 268, 290. 66. Conrad Gessner, Historiae animalium, Vol. 1 (Zurich: Christ. Froschauer, 1551), pp. 1000– 1011 (on culinary uses of the pig); Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (Frankfurt am Main: Wolfgang Richter for heirs of Nicolas Basaeus, 1610), pp. 145–151. 67. Jean Riolan, Opuscula nova anatomica (Paris: widow of Mathurin du Puis, 1653), Preface; Michael Lyser, Culter anatomicus (Copenhagen: Georg Lamprecht, 1653) (my translation). On Riolan’s attitude toward vivisection, see Anita Guerrini, “Experiments, Causation, and the Uses of Vivisection in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology, 46, 2013, pp. 227–254. 68. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoof, and Dugald Murdoch (eds. and trans.), Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 134. 69. MS O/1/2124, Archives Nationales, Paris. 70. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 294. 71. On Manzolini, see Rebecca Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lucia Dacome, “Women, Wax and Anatomy in the ‘Century of Things’,” Renaissance Studies, 21, 2007, pp. 522–550. On Biheron, Georges Boulinier, “Une femme anatomiste au siècles des Lumières: Marie Marguerite Biheron,” Histoire des science médicales, 35, 2001, 411–423. 72. F.J. Cole, “Harvey’s Animals,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 12, 1957, pp. 106–113. 73. Gerard Blaes, Miscellanea anatomica (Amsterdam: Officina Commeliniana, 1673),; see also the depiction of a fox being dissected in the headpiece to the preface of Perrault, Memoires pour servir a l’histoire naturelle des animaux, (not paginated). On the long history of human association with foxes, see Martin Wallen, Fox (London: Reaktion, 2006). On monkeys, see Louise Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and the forthcoming work of Alan S. Ross. 74. Lorenzo Bellini, Exercitatio anatomica, de structura et usu renum (Padua: Matteo Cadorini, 1663), p. 30. 75. Anita Guerrini, “Inside the Charnel House: the Display of Skeletons in Europe, 1500– 1800,” in Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), The Fate of Anatomical Collections (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 91–107. 76. William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery (London: R.W. for Giles Calvert, 1663), esp. pp. 209–229; Harold J. Cook, “Time’s Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia,” in Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen (eds.), Merchants and Marvels (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 223–247. 77. J.B.D.M. Saunders and C.D. O’Malley, “The Preparation of the Human Skeleton by Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. An Annotated Translation of the 39th Chapter of the De humani corporis fabrica, 1543,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 20, 1946, pp. 433–460, at pp. 441, 445–46.

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78. Michael Lyser, The Art of Dissecting the Human Body, trans. by G. Thomson (London: Joseph Davidson, 1740), p. 240. 79. On early modern smells, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Mark Jenner, “Follow Your Nose?: Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories, American Historical Review, 116, 2011, pp. 335–351; Richard Palmer, ”In Bad Odour: Smell and its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century,” in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 61–68. 80. On sensory experience in chemistry, see Evan Ragland, “Chymistry and Taste in the Seventeenth Century: Franciscus Dela Boë Sylvius as a Chymical Physician Between Galenism and Cartesianism, Ambix, 59, 2012, pp. 1–21 and Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 26, 1995, pp. 503–529. 81. William Harvey, Anatomical Exercitations, concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (London: Octavian Pulleyn, 1653), , pp. 354–55. 82. Pecquet, Experimenta nova anatomica, p. 5; Regnier De Graaf, Opera omnia (Leiden: Officina Hackiana, 1677), pp. 533, 540–41; Thomas Willis, Pharmaceuticae rationalis (The Hague: Arnold Leers, 1675), pp. 217–219. 83. Bellini, Exercitatio anatomica, pp. 29–30; Malpighi cited in Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease, pp. 292–93. 84. Foucault, Order of Things, p. xix.