 While it was claimed by 19th century polemicists that human dissection became restricted after Boniface VIII passed a papal bull that forbade the dismemberment and boiling of corpses for funerary purposes and this is still repeated in some generalist works, this claim has been debunked as a myth by modern historians of science.For many decades human dissection was thought unnecessary when all the knowledge about a human body could be read about from early authors such as Galen.In the 12th century, as universities were being established in Italy, Emperor Frederick II made it mandatory for students of medicine to take courses on human anatomy and surgery.