It is very commonly accepted that there was an interruption in the development of anatomical knowledge about the beginning of the fourteenth century because of a papal decree forbidding dissection. The statement that such a decree was promulgated is to be found in nearly every history of medicine published in English, and has been made much of in books on the supposed opposition of science and religion. There was no such decree, however, and the declaration that the development of anatomy was interfered with by the ecclesiastical authorities is founded on nothing more substantial than a misunderstanding of the purport of a decree of Pope Boniface VIII. In the year 1300 this Pope issued the Bull "De Sepulturis". The title of the Bull runs as follows: "Persons cutting up the bodies of the dead, barbarously cooking them in order that the bones being separated from the flesh may be carried for burial into their own countries are by the very fact excommunicated." The only possible explanation of the misunderstanding that the Bull forbade dissection is that some one read only the first part of the title and considered that as one of the methods of preparing bones for study in anatomy was by boiling them in order to be able to remove the flesh from them easily, that this decree forbade such practices thereafter.
A bit of lazy googling couldn't confirm this, but the only sites I read arguing otherwise were relying on those bad nineteenth-century "war between science and religion" historiographies.
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