Vivisection, Medicine, and Bioethics: A Case Study from Ancient Rome

This study deals with Greco-Roman approaches to the vivisection of human beings and its ethical implications. It is divided into two parts. In Part I, attention is paid to the interest of Hippocratic medicine (5th cent. BC) in human anatomy, which paved the way to dissection and vivisection in the Hellenistic age. The experiments carried out by the physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus in Alexandria (Egypt, 3rd cent. BC) sparked a lively debate on the scientific value of vivisection, which the Empiricist and Methodist medical schools denied. This latter line of thought prevailed, but dissections and vivisections are again well attested in the Im¬perial period, especially in Galen (2nd cent. AD), the greatest physician of antiquity. To this same age belongs another crucial but until now neglected source on vivisection: a Latin fictive speech (declamatio) entitled The Sick Twins (Gemini languentes), transmitted among the so-called Major Declamations falsely ascribed to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. The speech concerns a knotty problem: a father of two sick twins is accused by his wife of ill-treatment for hiring a doctor to save one of the twins by vivisecting – and inevitably killing – the other, instead of losing them both. Part II of the present study examines this speech, which affords a unique insight into human vivisection in Greco-Roman antiquity and the associated ethical issues.