40 Now the matters just referred to they10 deem to be superfluous; but what remains, cruel as well, to cut into the belly and chest11 of men whilst still alive, and to impose upon the Art which presides over human safety someone's d**h, and that too in the most atrocious way. Especially is this true when, of things which are sought for with so much violence, some can be learnt not at all, others can be learnt even without a crime. 41 For when the body had been laid open, colour, smoothness, softness, hardness and all similars would not be such as they were when the body was untouched; because bodies, even when uninjured yet often change in appearance, they note, from fear, pain, want of food, indigestion, weariness and a thousand other mediocre affections; it is much more likely that the more internal parts, which are far softer, and to which the very light is something novel, should under the most severe of woundings, in fact mangling, undergo changes. 42 Nor is anything more foolish, they say, than to suppose that whatever the condition of the part of a man's body in life, it will also be the same when he is dying, nay, when he is already dead; for the belly indeed, which is of less importance, can be laid open with the man still breathing; but as soon as the knife really penetrates to the chest, by cutting through the transverse septum, a sort of membrane which divides the upper from the lower parts (the Greeks call it διάφραγμα), the man loses his life at once: so it is only when the man is dead that the chest and any of the viscera come into the view of the medical murderer, and they are necessarily those of a dead, not of a living man. 43 It follows, therefore, that the medical man just plays the cut-throat, not that he learns p25what our viscera are like when we are alive. If, however, there be anything to be observed whilst a man is still breathing, chance often presents it to the view of those treating him. For sometimes a gladiator in the arena, or a soldier in battle, or a traveller who has been set upon by robbers, is so wounded that some or other interior part is exposed in one man or another. Thus, they say, an observant practitioner learns to recognize site, position, arrangement, shape and such like, not when slaughtering, but whilst striving for health; and he learns in the course of a work of mercy, what others would come to know by means of dire cruelty. 44 That for these reasons, since most things are altered in the dead, some hold that even the dissection of the dead is unnecessary; although not cruel, it is none the less nasty; but all that is possible to come to know in the living, the actual treatment exhibits.