At any period of time, bodies that could be used for dissection were extremely scarce.
However, dissecting a body was very important to surgeons, especially during the early periods of surgery development. Most surgeons were criminals who stole corpses at that time. One of the most famous perpetrator at that time was the father of anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, who started out dissecting animals. Later on, he went to mass graves to steal corpses, before moving on to the corpses of criminals who were hanged, because they were fresh.
Not long after, when the sextons noticed what Andreas was doing, his cellar was already filled with bloody human brains, hearts, livers, spleens, limbs, and other body parts.
Later, Andreas, who got out of jail through bribery, wrote a book titled [De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem] [1]. He corrected more than three hundred errors made by Galen, who had been the person of authority at that time when it came to the human body.
