Dissections, or Human bodies' poikilia

Realdo Colombo, in 1559, emphasised the uniformity of human bodies and the rarity of anatomical anomalies. He was trying to counter the idea that variations were of frequent occurrence - and idea that he took to be widespread. In his opinion, this notion was a legacy of the frivolous and ignorant scholastic physicians of the bad old days, who, on the rare occasions when they did briefly inspect the entrails of a cadaver, took for granted that everything they could not immediately identify in the Canon of Avicenna or the early fourteenth-century manual of anatomy by Mondino de' Liuzzi was some kind of monstrosity.

Nancy G. Siraisi. Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis fabrica // Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 57, 1994 (1994), pp. 60-88.