As my summary of the early preforma

As my summary of the early preformation doctrine has suggested, there is a great deal of validity in Adelmann’s characterization. Without doubt much of the writing of this period is marked by concern for inherited theories and philosophical abstractions at the expense of more direct observation of human development and anatomy. But Adelmann does a disservice to the writing on embryology of this period when he fails to recognize how fundamental a change in thinking about the body he is demanding of these writers. Jonathan Sawday has recently written about dissection in early modern medicine, and has suggested that the shift from taking the body as an emblem of the larger cosmos to seeing it as an object to be taken apart and studied has radical implications.40 Sawday writes