Edmund Pellegrino defines medicine as the physician-patient relationship with the goal of healing. If the goal of medicine is healing the patient, why is there a persistent tendency to reduce patients to objects in medicine? Michel Foucault argues that modern medicine was born in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century when pathological anatomy became coupled with clinical medicine. Consequently, the dead body became the epistemologically normative body in modern medicine. I go beyond Foucault’s thesis to make a more radical claim: the tendency to reduce patients into objects arises from the logic of Western medicine itself, which is the logic of dissection. In this way, anatomical dissection becomes the paradigmatic way of medical knowing—to know the body is to cut it up and reduce it to parts. Starting with Hippocrates, I trace the development of medicine’s logic of dissection by briefly surveying major figures in the history of medicine, demonstrating how physical dissection transforms into mental dissection. I conclude that the logic of dissection remains the fundamental way that medicine sees its patients today: as objects to be dissected. Examples of mental dissection in clinical practice will be provided.