The Practice of Medical Dissection in Third-Century BCE Alexandria, Egypt as a Heterotopia of Deviation

Abstract

Summary I argue that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is a useful way to look at the practice of systematic human dissection performed in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century BCE. Foucault’s idea provides a novel way to consider why this practice—one not documented in any other time or place within Greek or Roman antiquity, and not officially recorded as a practice again until the 14th century CE with the work of de Liuzzi and da Vigevano—might have occurred when and where it did.