Why books have chapters

Did you know the reason books have sections is actually because of anatomy?

According to the historian Richard Sugg, the idea of cutting up, analysing and methodically dissecting a topic in fact comes from anatomical dissection, first spilling into popular culture around the late 1500s. The word ‘section’ originally came from dissecting a body and was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1559. It appeared in the engraver and printer Thomas Geminus’ rip off of Vesalius’ Fabrica, which included the line: ‘neither in man only . . . but in the anatomy or section of any other beast’.

But it soon jumped ship or as Sugg puts it: ‘the Latin root “sectio” (a cutting, cutting off, or cutting up) was increasingly propelled into a broader vernacular use by association with dis-section’, and from 1577 onwards, books began to have ‘sections’.

Books with ‘Anatomy’ in the title also became all the rage, and between 1576 and 1650, around 120 titles were published which ‘anatomised’ a topic like The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon (1622), The Anatomie of Urines (1625) and the Anti-duello: The Anatomie of Duells (1632). The most well-known from this period is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Eighty-four books had ‘lay open’ or ‘rip’ in their titles. Sugg also discusses how the word ‘analyses’ is connected to anatomy—to analyse was to ‘undo’ or ‘break down’—and that between 1585 and 1642, sixteen ‘analyses’ were published.