Trinity College, MS O.2.44, fol. 3 verso, 15th century.
By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The text of Henri de Mondeville’s book on anatomy calls for a frontal view of the figure of a man showing his bones, cartilages, and ligaments, together with the principal nerves and muscles in the limbs of arms and legs. The small skeleton depicted here is a simple bone man, with no labels to identify the separate bones. It resembles the kind of emblematic skeleton figures to be found in illustrations of the Dance of Death in contemporary Books of Hours. It is hard to imagine that a surgeon would have learned any useful anatomy from the figure.

Peter Jones