The popular story of a leg transplant performed by physician saints Cosmos and Damian changes in its late-medieval retelling to emphasise not only the grafting of a black leg onto a sick white man but also the attaching of the gangrenous white leg onto the corpse of the Moor from whom the original graft was taken104. Such tales surely suggest that the intact condition of the body, even after death, had deep significance.
104. Judith-Danielle Jacquet, “Le Miracle de la Jambe Noire,” in Gélis and Redon (eds.), Les Miracles miroirs, pp. 23-52.