During the Middle Ages there had been developed various theological doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon arguments showing what the body OUGHT TO BE, and naturally, when anatomical science showed what it IS, these doctrines fell.

An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year in which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had twenty or twenty-two.
So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other.

This creation of Eve was a favourite subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals, and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing this dealt a blow at much else in the sacred theory.

Naturally, all these considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism against the innovators in anatomy.( 321) (321) As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the Gesta Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis,...

descripta a magistro Rigardo, 1219, edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in Histories Francorum Scriptores, tom.